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

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.