An exciting paper on lipids has just been published in Nature. This is the culmination of a huge amount of work, particularly by Art Laganowsky and Eamon Reading in Carol Robinson’s group. In this work, it is demonstrated that specific individual lipid binding events can change the structure and the function of membrane proteins. This remains a tricky thing to measure, but this paper establishes a rigorous mass spectrometry method for quantitatively determining the binding. This requires statistical strategies to deal with the stochastic fluctuations inherent to molecules that are being introduced to the gas phase.