LIPEA: Lipid Pathway Enrichment Analysis

Motivation: Analyzing associations among multiple omic variables to infer mechanisms that meaningfully link them is a crucial step in systems biology. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) was conceived to pursue this aim in computational genomics, unveiling significant pathways associated to certain gene signatures under investigation. Lipidomics is a rapidly growing omic field, and absolute quantification of lipid abundance by shotgun mass spectrometry is generating high-throughput datasets that depict lipid metabolism in a plethora of conditions and organisms. In addition, high-throughput lipidomics represents a new important ally to develop personalized medicine approaches, investigate the causes and predict effective biomarkers in metabolic diseases, and not only.Results: Here, we present Lipid Pathway Enrichment Analysis (LIPEA), a web-tool for over-representation analysis of lipid signatures and detection of the biological pathways in which they are enriched. LIPEA is a new valid resource for biologists and physicians to mine pathways significantly associated to a set of lipids, helping them to discover whether common and collective mechanisms are hidden behind those lipids. LIPEA was extensively tested and we provide two examples where our system gave successfully results related with Major Depression Disease (MDD) and insulin resistance.