Bioinformatics and Systems Biology of the Lipidome

Lipids play an important role in physiology and pathophysiology of living systems. Several large-scale projects to characterize lipids and their functional roles have been initiated as exemplified by the LIPID MAPS effort. The LIPID MAPS is an exemplary systems biology project that measures cell-wide lipid changes in an attempt to reconstruct biochemical pathways associated with lipid processing and signaling. The structures of large and complex lipids are difficult to represent in drawings, which leads to the use of many custom formats that often generate more confusion than clarity among members of the lipid research community. A set of simple online interfaces have been developed to enable an end-user to rapidly generate a variety of lipid chemical structures, along with corresponding systematic names and ontological information. The sterol drawing tools currently support the generation of structures derived from cholestane, ergostane, campestane, and stigmastane sterol cores.