Abstract
As biomolecules, sphingolipids represent a broad spectrum of structures ranging from simple long chain bases to complex glycosphingolipids. While several different mass spectrometry based approaches have been proven to be useful in qualitative and quantitative analysis of sphingolipids, we find that electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS) in the multiple-reaction monitoring (MRM) mode using a triple quadrupole instrument, coupled to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), is the most suitable approach for the analysis. In this chapter, we describe the method in a step-by-step manner towards the targeted analysis of sphingolipids in fungi. With optimized HPLC separation and instrument settings, this MRM approach affords detection of many sphingolipid species simultaneously with good sensitivity.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants to A.S. from ICMR (No. 52/08/2019-BIO/BMS), DST-PURSE program (SR/PURSE Phase 2/29(C)), UP Higher Education (No. 10/2021/281/-4-2021-04(2)/2021), DBT (BT/PR38505/MED/29/1513/2020) and the University of Lucknow, and NIH grants AI136934, AI116420 and AI125770, by Merit Review Grant I01BX002924 from the Veterans Affairs Program to M.D.P., who is Burroughs Welcome Investigator in Infectious Diseases. M.D.P. is a Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of MicroRid Technologies Incorporated. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.
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Singh, A., Del Poeta, M. (2021). Mass Spectrometric Analysis of Bioactive Sphingolipids in Fungi. In: Hsu, FF. (eds) Mass Spectrometry-Based Lipidomics. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 2306. Humana, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1410-5_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1410-5_16
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