Eigenlipids for exploring lipid biology

Lipidomics involves the analysis of hundreds or even thousands of lipids within biological systems. Many of these lipids are highly correlated due to similarities in structure or relationships within metabolic pathways. Eigenlipids, as a concept ported over from transcriptomics, can be used to capture these associations and to explore relationships between their constituent lipids and phenotypes of interest. However, gene expression and lipid concentration data differ in how they are structured, requiring additional considerations for eigenlipid analysis. In this review, we discuss how eigenlipids are generated, how they are used to explore lipid metabolism and biology, possible usage pitfalls and finally potential future methodological developments, such as alternative dimensionality reduction methods and generating eigenlipids for predefined lipid sets instead of unsupervised clusters.