With the increasing number of lipidomic studies, there
is a need
for an 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 () 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 reference
data sets, select a grammar for lipid name normalization, and then
process the data. The user can then interactively explore the results
and perform lipid over-representation 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 data set is the information that the query is significantly enriched
with “glycerophospholipids” containing “acyl
20:4” at the “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 data sets
to facilitate their interpretation at the molecular level.