UMass Chan Affiliations
Program in Gene Function and ExpressionDocument Type
Journal ArticlePublication Date
2005-01-25Keywords
AcyltransferasesAlcohol Oxidoreductases
Amidohydrolases
Animals
Ceramidases
Ceramides
Drosophila melanogaster
Oxidoreductases
Phosphotransferases (Alcohol Group Acceptor)
Serine C-Palmitoyltransferase
Sphingolipids
Genetics and Genomics
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Sphingolipids are important structural components of membranes that delimit the boundaries of cellular compartments, cells and organisms. They play an equally important role as second messengers, and transduce signals across or within the compartments they define to initiate physiological changes during development, differentiation and a host of other cellular events. For well over a century Drosophila melanogaster has served as a useful model organism to understand some of the fundamental tenets of development, differentiation and signaling in eukaryotic organisms. Directed approaches to study sphingolipid biology in Drosophila have been initiated only recently. Nevertheless, earlier phenotypic studies conducted on genes of unknown biochemical function have recently been recognized as mutants of enzymes of sphingolipid metabolism. Genome sequencing and annotation have aided the identification of homologs of recently discovered genes. Here we present an overview of studies on enzymes of the de novo sphingolipid biosynthetic pathway, known mutants and their phenotypic characterization in Drosophila.Source
Cell Mol Life Sci. 2005 Jan;62(2):128-42. Link to article on publisher's siteDOI
10.1007/s00018-004-4254-1Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/43922PubMed ID
15666085Related Resources
Link to Article in PubMedae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1007/s00018-004-4254-1