Traditional lipid quantitation methods require expensive HPLC or light scattering detection equipment. Our Lipid Quantitation Kit provides a simple method for quantitation of lipids in a standard 96-well microplate reader. The kit uses a sulfo-phospho-vanillin system in which samples are acidified and heated to solubilize and prime them for quantitation. In an acidic environment, vanillin reagent reacts with the lipids to form a colored product that is easily detected by the plate reader at 540 nm.