Abstract
Sphingoid bases, which have a 2-amino-1,3-diol common functional group, are the structural backbone units of all sphingolipids. Recently, much attention has been focused on sphingoid bases because of their potentially beneficial bioactivities toward various cancer cells as well as their dietary interest. However, low abundance and the handling complexity caused by their amphiphilic character led to very limited research on them. Glutaraldehyde has two aldehyde groups, and it reacts rapidly with the 2-amino-1,3-diol functional group of sphingosine to give a tricyclic product. Immobilization of glutaraldehyde on a resin was successfully performed by organic synthesis, starting from trans-p-coumaric acid via eight steps. This approach suppresses the self-polymerization of glutaraldehyde, and addition of water to the developed resin causes the formation of cyclic double hemiacetal function, which avoids oxidation like a reducing sugar in nature and makes it stable even for up to 1 year incubation. The resin was applied to the solid-phase extracting experiment of free sphingosine from human serum at a concentration of 280 nM. Another extraction study of edible golden oyster mushrooms showed that the sphingoid base was selectively captured from complex natural extracts. These results demonstrate that the developed glutaraldehyde resin method is a highly selective method, and hence, the combination of it with the o-phthaldialdehyde HPLC method was confirmed as an efficient and sensitive method for analysis of sphingoid bases in biological samples.