LORA, Lipid Over-Representation Analysis based on structural information

Abstract

With the increasing number of lipidomic studies, there is a need for efficient and automated analysis of lipidomic data. One of the challenges faced by most existing approaches to lipidomic data analysis is lipid nomenclature. The systematic nomenclature of lipids contains all available information about the molecule, including its hierarchical representation, which can be used for statistical evaluation. The Lipid Over-Representation Analysis (LORA) web application (https://lora.metabolomics.fgu.cas.cz) analyzes this information using the Java-based Goslin framework, which translates lipid names into a standardized nomenclature. Goslin provides the level of lipid hierarchy, including information on headgroups, acyl chains, and their modifications, up to the complete structure level. LORA allows the user to upload the experimental query and universe datasets, select a grammar for lipid name normalization, and then process the data. The user can then interactively explore the results and perform lipid overrepresentation analysis based on selected criteria. The results are graphically visualized according to the lipidome hierarchy. The lipids present in the most over-represented terms (lipids with the highest number of enriched shared structural features) are defined as Very Important Lipids (VILs). For example, the main result of a demo dataset is the information that the query is significantly enriched with glycerophospholipids containing acyl 20:4 at sn-2 position. These terms define a set of VILs (e.g., PC 18:2/20:4;O and PE 16:0/20:4(5,8,10,14);OH). All results, graphs, and visualizations are summarized in a report. LORA is a tool focused on the smart mining of epilipidomics datasets to facilitate their interpretation at the molecular level.