Systematic management and analysis of fatty acid data from multiple tissue samples.

A systematic approach has been developed for the collection and analysis of gas chromatographic (GC) data from multiple fatty acid profiles. The approach was applied to a series of polar and nonpolar tissue lipids generated in animal feeding studies to allow a comparison of mean fatty acid profiles as a function of either dietary regimen or tissue location. The magnitude of the studies, sufficiently large to minimize error from animal variabilities, mandated the use of computer assistance. Nevertheless, manual input was essential due to the complexity of the GC patterns, and was invoked for peak assignment and report editing. The approach discussed here allowed for the consolidation and statistical analysis of data from over 30,000 GC peaks, and generated results in both tabular and graphic formats. It should be extendable to other chromatographic studies of lipid components.