Streamlined, accurate, and accessible data analyses suites for lipidomic studies can powerfully accelerate your experiments. To fulfill data analysis and visualization needs, Metabolon’s offers the Lipid Surveyor tool, an innovative, online biomarker discovery and pathway mapping tool designed to visualize, analyze, and interpret lipidomic study results with a rich collection of capabilities. Lipid Surveyor allows investigators to simply and efficiently view studies performed with Metabolon, download data files, and build visual reports of results.
Define Your Lipidomics Study Parameters
Utilizing Lipid Surveyor, investigators can view their reports and define their experimental parameters for analyses. Investigators begin by configuring their report using the “Discovery” option and selecting “Biomarker Performance” to compare study groups, determine display formats, and set comparison parameters. Data can be further configured to include matrices for multiple sample types, calculate fold-changes or mean differences from control groups, as well as sort options ranging from standard order, magnitude of difference, and significance. Lipid Surveyor utilizes a simple click-and-go interface to allow users to quickly begin visualization of their results.
Visualize Your Lipidomics Results
After Discovery reports are configured, data visualization in Surveyor is intuitive and easily customizable. Depending on the parameters set by the investigator, a bar chart is displayed highlighting differences between groups across all metabolites detected along with a summary box displaying overall changes detected in your study, including the total number of metabolites detected and how many reached statistical significance. For instance, if an investigator is interested in fold changes, Lipid Surveyor will display a bar chart that can rank in order of fold changes in concentration, color-coded based on significance (red = increases, blue = decreases, white = no change). Display options allow you to adjust how your data are organized, from scaling factors and color, as well as adding study notes to your report.
Investigators can dive deeper into their data by individually selecting each bar plot in the visualization. They are then provided data for the selected lipid for both the case and control group in box and whiskers format, p-values associated with the test, and group means. Moreover, investigators can access the public database, Lipid Maps and Human Metabolome Database, for more information about the metabolite. Multiple comparison options are also available during report configuration and provide analyses if the user requires multiple tests.
Overall, Lipid Surveyor provides a simple and efficient way to identify potential biomarkers from thousands of metabolites.
Analyze Lipid Pathways
After the Discovery report provides metabolites of interest, the same group comparisons can be performed in the context of biochemical pathways. Here, investigators have the option of investigating pathway data at the level of fatty acids, sphingolipids, or complex lipids. Parameters are just as customizable as Discovery reports, allowing you to configure study groups, fold-changes or mean differences, and significance levels.
Visualization of pathway maps in Lipid Surveyor is clean and easy to interpret. The resulting map displays each measured metabolite organized by biochemical pathways and color-coded based on magnitude of change in concentration. Like Discovery reports, each node of the pathway can be selected to view a box plot and details for the corresponding lipid. A compositional matrix is also displayed to highlight patterns associated with specific acyl chain types within and across lipid classes.
Filter and Customize Your Lipidomics Report
For further customization, Lipid Surveyor allows investigators to limit which metabolites are displayed in the visualization by adding filters to their data sets. These filters include attributes such as the name, description, and metabolite composition. The filtered attributes limit the Discovery Report display to only show the selected attributes.
Data can be further adjusted by adding signatures to calculate ratios between metabolites and/or groups of metabolites at a species or class level. The investigator can then customize their signature according to the metabolite and desired equation. These signatures are then applied to the Discovery report.
Share Lipidomics Data with Your Collaborators
In addition to being able to download and customize reports for .xlsx formats, Lipid Surveyor provides a simple interface to invite collaborators to view and access study results.
Metabolon’s Lipid Surveyor is comprehensive, efficient, and easy to use. Its data analyses and data visualization capabilities are tailored to your lipidomic study needs and allows figures to be generated that are suitable for data interpretation, presentations, and publications. To see a demonstration of Metabolon’s Lipid Surveyor, take a look at this video.
