Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Division of Infectious Diseases, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina 29425, USA.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2010;688:232-7. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4419-6741-1_16.
Sphingolipid involvement in infectious disease is a new and exciting branch of research. Various microbial pathogens have been shown to synthesize their own sphingolipids and some have evolved methods to "hijack" host sphingolipids for their own use. For instance, Sphingomonas species are bacterial pathogens that lack the lipopolysaccharide component typical but instead contain glycosphingolipids (Kawahara 1991, 2006). In terms of sphingolipid signaling and function, perhaps the best-studied group of microbes is the pathogenic fungi. Pathogenic fungi still represent significant problems in human disease, despite treatments that have been used for decades. Because fungi are eukaryotic, drug targets in fungi can have many similarities to mammalian processes. This often leads to significant side effects of antifungal drugs that can be dose limiting in many patient populations. The search for fungal-specific drugs and the need for better understanding of cellular processes of pathogenic fungi has led to a large body of research on fungal signaling. One particularly interesting and rapidly growing field in this research is the involvement of fungal sphingolipid pathways in signaling and virulence. In this chapter, the research relating to sphingolipid signaling pathogenic fungi will be reviewed and summarized, in addition to highlighting pathways that show promise for future research.
鞘脂类物质在传染病中的作用是一个新的、令人兴奋的研究分支。各种微生物病原体已被证明能够合成自己的鞘脂类物质，有些甚至进化出了“劫持”宿主鞘脂类物质为己用的方法。例如，鞘氨醇单胞菌属是缺乏脂多糖成分的细菌病原体，而代之以糖脂（Kawahara 1991, 2006）。在鞘脂信号和功能方面，研究得最好的微生物群可能要属致病真菌。尽管已经使用了几十年的治疗方法，但致病真菌仍然是人类疾病的重大问题。由于真菌是真核生物，真菌中的药物靶点与哺乳动物的过程可能有许多相似之处。这往往会导致抗真菌药物产生严重的副作用，在许多患者群体中，这些副作用可能会限制药物的使用剂量。为了寻找真菌特异性药物以及更好地了解致病真菌的细胞过程，人们对真菌信号转导进行了大量研究。在这项研究中，一个特别有趣且发展迅速的领域是真菌鞘脂途径在信号转导和毒力中的作用。在本章中，将对与致病真菌鞘脂信号转导相关的研究进行综述和总结，并强调有希望用于未来研究的途径。
