biological processes related to lipid, lipoprotein and fatty acid metabolism, binding and transport activities, and triglyceride metabolism to be significantly enriched for LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol and/or triglyceride associations after Bonferroni correction (top gene sets are listed in Table 2; full list in Tables S5, S6, S7). These results are robust relative to the method used to correct for confounders on gene association scores (Tables S8, S9, S10). Enrichment of LDL and HDL associations in the lipid transport process has been previously reported [25]. While most of the enriched processes contain at least one gene near a validated lipid SNP, this analysis also found enrichment in a pathway with unknown associations (the fatty acid metabolic process). The fact that the enrichment signals for many of the significant processes were still detectable after removing the known lipid genes from the GSEA analysis, suggests that some of the nominally significant associations in these pathways may represent true associations of more modest effects yet to be identified.
