Farwanah Hany, Kolter Thomas, Sandhoff Konrad
University of Bonn, Gerhard-Domagk, Bonn, Germany.
Biochim Biophys Acta. 2011 Nov;1811(11):854-60. doi: 10.1016/j.bbalip.2011.05.011. Epub 2011 Jun 27.
Sphingolipids represent an important class among lipids, especially when considering their vital roles in lipid metabolism. Thus, a variety of methods have been created to accomplish their analysis and the term "sphingolipidomics" has recently been coined to underline the motivation to enable a comprehensive analysis of all sphingolipid species including the acidic and the neutral ones. In this review, we summarize selected mainly biomedical based mass spectrometric approaches for the analysis of neutral sphingolipids regarding their advantages, applications and limitations. To underline some practical aspects of method development, we focus on a new method recently developed in our laboratory, which enables separation, detection, and mass spectrometric profiling of ceramide, hexosylceramide, lactosylceramide, globotriaosylceramide, globotetraosylceramide, sphingomyelin species, and cholesterol in one run. This method can be applied to investigate impairments of neutral sphingolipid metabolism in a variety of disorders such as sphingolipidoses and be employed to screen for sphingolipid profile changes as induced by knockout experiments or related studies.
鞘脂类是脂质中的一个重要类别，尤其是考虑到它们在脂质代谢中的关键作用时。因此，人们开发了多种方法来进行它们的分析，并且最近创造了“鞘脂组学”这个术语，以强调对包括酸性和中性鞘脂在内的所有鞘脂种类进行全面分析的动机。在本综述中，我们总结了主要基于生物医学的选定质谱方法，用于分析中性鞘脂的优势、应用和局限性。为了强调方法开发的一些实际方面，我们重点介绍了我们实验室最近开发的一种新方法，该方法能够在一次运行中对神经酰胺、己糖神经酰胺、乳糖神经酰胺、球三糖神经酰胺、球四糖神经酰胺、鞘磷脂种类和胆固醇进行分离、检测和质谱分析。该方法可用于研究多种疾病（如鞘脂贮积症）中中性鞘脂代谢的损伤情况，并可用于筛选基因敲除实验或相关研究诱导的鞘脂谱变化。
