Discovery of novel diagnostic biomarkers for Sjögren-Larsson syndrome by untargeted lipidomics.

Biochim Biophys Acta Mol Cell Biol Lipids

United for Metabolic Diseases, the Netherlands; Department of Pediatric Neurology, Radboud University Medical Center, Amalia Children's Hospital, Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Published: March 2024

AI Article Synopsis

  • Sjögren-Larsson syndrome (SLS) is a rare condition that affects the brain, eyes, and skin due to a lack of a specific enzyme involved in fatty aldehyde metabolism.
  • Researchers conducted plasma lipidomics to identify potential biomarkers for SLS, discovering significant disturbances in ether lipid metabolism and finding two new lipid classes significantly elevated in affected individuals.
  • The identified metabolites may serve as novel blood-based biomarkers for SLS and could enhance our understanding of the disorder's pathology.

Article Abstract

Aim: Sjögren-Larsson syndrome (SLS) is a rare neurometabolic disorder that mainly affects brain, eye and skin and is caused by deficiency of fatty aldehyde dehydrogenase. Our recent finding of a profoundly disturbed brain tissue lipidome in SLS prompted us to search for similar biomarkers in plasma as no functional test in blood is available for SLS.

Methods And Results: We performed plasma lipidomics and used a newly developed bioinformatics tool to mine the untargeted part of the SLS plasma and brain lipidome to search for SLS biomarkers. Plasma lipidomics showed disturbed ether lipid metabolism in known lipid classes. Untargeted lipidomics of both plasma and brain (white and grey matter) uncovered two new endogenous lipid classes highly elevated in SLS. The first biomarker group were alkylphosphocholines/ethanolamines containing different lengths of alkyl-chains where some alkylphosphocholines were > 600-fold elevated in SLS plasma. The second group of biomarkers were a set of 5 features of unknown structure. Fragmentation studies suggested that they contain ubiquinol and phosphocholine and one feature was also found as a glucuronide conjugate in plasma. The plasma features were highly distinctive for SLS with levels >100-1000-fold the level in controls, if present at all. We speculate on the origin of the alkylphosphocholines/ethanolamines and the nature of the ubiquinol-containing metabolites.

Conclusions: The metabolites identified in this study represent novel endogenous lipid classes thus far unknown in humans. They represent the first plasma metabolite SLS-biomarkers and may also yield more insight into SLS pathophysiology.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbalip.2023.159447DOI Listing

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