Abstract: Semen quality evaluation is one of important means to assess the fecundity of male animals.With the fast development of omics technologies, researchers can obtain high-throughput information of genes, transcripts, proteins, metabolites, etc.The information is of great value for research on semen quality evaluation and sperm-related assisted reproductive technologies.In recent years, researchers have attempted to use lipidomic technologies to investigate the factors affecting sperm cell fertility in mammals.Lipidomics mainly uses high-throughput technologies to explore the composition and distribution of lipids in cells, tissues, or organisms, and accurately quantify the content of lipids, so as to elucidate the relationship between lipid diversity and cell metabolism regulation and corresponding biological functions.As the downstream products of proteins and nucleic acids, lipids can more directly reflect the real-time physiological state of tissues and cells.The plasma membrane of sperm is rich in various lipids, which have important impacts on the structure and function of sperm.In addition, some potential lipid markers can be obtained by lipidomic studies for the evaluation of semen quality in livestock.At present, lipidomics has been used to study the features of fatty acids in sperm.However, despite the rapid development of lipidomics studies in recent years, this method still has some limitations.There is no unified standard for the technical process of lipid extraction from various samples, which leads to different interpretations of the same result.Therefore, there is still a large space for improvement of lipidomic technologies.This review introduces the lipidomic characteristics of livestock semen, summarizes the development status of lipidomics in the field of semen quality evaluation and in vitro storage, and forecasts its future developmental trend.

Key words: semen quality; lipid; lipidomics; biomarkers; cryotolerance