Figure 1

Lipid concentration correlations within the plasma lipidome. Pearson correlation coefficients (r) were calculated from the molar amounts of all lipid species (n = 203) across all subjects (n = 227). (A) Distribution of correlation coefficients: Overall: for all lipid species; Within class: for all species within the same class; CE ~ other classes: between all CE subspecies and non-CE species; CE ~ PC: between CE and PC lipid subspecies; and CE-FA ~ PC-FA: between CE and PC lipid subspecies which share a common fatty acid. Distribution’s mean, standard deviation, and n are indicated in the upper left corner of each panel. (B) Correlation coefficient (r) between individual CE subspecies and non-CE species (“other species” in grey). PC lipid subspecies which contain the same fatty acid (1^st FA) as the indicated CE subspecies are shown in red (CE-FA ~ PC-FA, see Table S2). CE subspecies are sorted from top to bottom according to the highest of these CE-FA ~ PC-FA correlations. CE subspecies, which do not match a corresponding PC subspecies have been omitted (n = 1). The second fatty acid (2^nd FA) of PCs, not shared with CE, is indicated by triangles in the case of 16:0;0 (connected for different CE by a solid line) and by squares in the case of 18:0;0 (connected for different CE by a dotted line). Grey dashed line indicates r = 0 and the grey dotted line indicates the cut-off for the correlation network shown in Fig. 2.