On Dec. 12, 2020, PLOS Medicine online published a work of Prof. LIN Xu’s group from Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), entitled “Associations among circulating sphingolipids, β-cell function, and risk of developing type 2 diabetes: A population-based cohort study in China”. This study is the first to discover the largest number of type 2 diabetes (T2D) associated sphingolipid species, largely mediated through β-cell dysfunction in Chinese. 

Sphingolipids represent a class of structurally and functionally diverse lipid molecules, including ceramides, sphingomyelins, and glycosphingolipids. Animal studies suggested vital roles of sphingolipids, especially ceramides, in the pathogenesis of T2D via pathways involved in insulin resistance, β-cell dysfunction, and inflammation, but human studies were limited. Moreover, most prior studies generally focused on limited numbers of sphingolipid species. 

Collaborated with Prof. ZENG Rong’s research group from the Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science of CAS, Prof. LIN Xu’s group applied high-coverage targeted lipidomics to measure 76 sphingolipids out of 728 lipids in 2,248 subjects from the Nutrition and Health of Aging Population in China (NHAPC) study. Ph.D. candidate YUN Huan and associate professor SUN Liang investigated the prospective associations of circulating sphingolipids with 6-yr incident type 2 diabetes.  

From the research, 1,974 Chinese men and women free of diabetes at baseline, eleven novel and three reported sphingolipids, namely four ceramides, nine sphingomyelins, and a hexosylceramide, were identified to be positively associated with incident T2D. Network analysis further supported the above finding.