Skip to main content
Figure 3 | Genome Medicine

Figure 3

From: Interrogating causal pathways linking genetic variants, small molecule metabolites, and circulating lipids

Figure 3

Three different statistical analyses to test the hypothesis that a metabolite mediates the FADS1 → TG pathway. The rs174546-T allele in FADS1 locus is associated with both triglycerides and a small molecule metabolite, PC ae C38:5. We have tested the hypothesis that a metabolite mediates the lipid pathway using three different statistical approaches. The conditional analysis (left) confirmed that the effect size of rs174546 on triglyceride decreased conditional on PC ae C38:5 in both KORA and TwinsUK cohorts (top and bottom). The MR (middle) estimated a statistically significant causal effect of PC ae C38:5 on triglyceride, which however was not replicated in TwinsUK at 5% significance level, perhaps due to the small sample size (KORA = 1,797 and unrelated TwinsUK = 845). The SEM (right) showed that out of all possible models tested, the model 4 (rs174546 → PC ae C38:5 → trycliceride) was the best fitted one in both cohorts.

Back to article page