Abstract
Glucosylceramide and galactosylceramide were detected in three Aspergillus species: Aspergillus oryzae, Aspergillus sojae and Aspergillus. awamori, using borate-coated TLC. The cerebrosides from A. oryzae were further purified by ion exchange and iatrobeads column chromatographies with or without borate, and determined the composition of sugar, fatty acid and sphingoid base by GC/MS, MALDI-TOF/MS and 1H-NMR. We identified them as β-glucosylceramide and β-galactosylceramide. The ceramide moiety of both cerebrosides consisted mainly of 2-hydroxystearic acid and either 9-methyl-octadeca-4, 8-sphingadienine or octadeca-4, 8-sphingadienine. To our knowledge, this is the first study to provide evidence for the presence of β-galactosylceramide in A. oryzae.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. N. Hada (Keio University) for help with NMR analyses, and Messrs. M. Nishio and H. Kojima (Ritsumeikan University) for technical assistance with MALDI-TOF/MS and NMR analyses. This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B 16380063, to K.Y.) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; and Y.T. was supported by the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) program of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Japan to the Graduate School of Biostudies and Institute for Virus Research, Kyoto University.
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Tani, Y., Amaishi, Y., Funatsu, T. et al. Structural analysis of cerebrosides from Aspergillus fungi: the existence of galactosylceramide in A. oryzae . Biotechnol Lett 36, 2507–2513 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-014-1631-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-014-1631-1