Mapping regional changes in the glycerophosphocholine second messenger lipidome following brain injury using CIRCOS

Although it is clear that lipid deregulation is a critical component of many neurodegenerative diseases, including stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, the tools to adequately study such changes are still being developed. While acquisition of lipidomic data has been greatly improved with the development of new technologies, the bottleneck of this type of “omic” research still lies in data analysis and post-processing. Individual lipid species need to be identified, which is being addressed by new tools such as VaLID (Visualization and Phospholipid Identification). However, we still lack the representational capacity to identify important species and critical relationships within large datasets that conventional visualization methods obfuscate. Here we present a Circos-based method to display integrative relationships across multi-modal lipidomic datasets, and develop a method to intuitively explore these data for biologically relevant relationships.