On March 06, 2012, researchers at Yunsen Li group published an article entitled “High expression of lactotriaosylceramide, a differentiation-associated glycosphingolipid, in the bone marrow of acute myeloid leukemia patients” in Glycobiology.
Glycosphingolipids (GSLs) are information-bearing bio-molecules that play critical roles in embryonic development, signal transduction and carcinogenesis. Previous studies indicate that certain GSLs are associated with differentiation in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cells. In this study, we collected bone marrow samples from healthy donors and AML patients and analyzed the GSL expression pro?les comprehensively using electrospray ionization linear ion-trap mass spectrometry. The results showed that AML patients had higher expression of the GSL lactotriaosylceramide (Lc3), GM3 and neolactotetraosylceramide (nLc4) in their bone marrow than did the healthy donors, especially the M1 subtype of AML. To further explore the molecular mechanisms of Lc3, we examined the expression of the Lc3 synthase β1,3-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase5 (β3Gn-T5) and found that the bone marrow samples of AML patients had 16-fold higher expression of β3Gn-T5 than those of healthy donors. Our results suggest that AML-associated GSLs Lc3, GM3 and nLc4 are possibly involved in initiation and differentiation of AML..
Zheng Wang Lijun Wen and Xiao Ma are the first authors of the paper. Other contributing authors are Zijun Chen, Yunhui Yu, Jian Zhu, Yanping Wang, Zhenming Liu, Haiyan Liu, . Prof. Yunsen Li,Depei Wu and Dapeng Zhou are the co-corresponding authors of the paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31000370), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK2011288), the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University (IRT1075), the Suzhou Key Laboratories (SWG0904) and the National Institutes of Health through MD Anderson’s Cancer Center Support grant (CA16672) and other grants (AI079232, AI078898, P30-AI36211).