ABSTRACT
Research Institute for Medicines and Pharmaceutical Sciences (i-Med-UL), Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Lisbon, Av. Prof. Gama Pinto, 1649-003 Lisboa, Portugal.
* Corresponding author: mhribeiro@ff.ul.pt
Glycolipids (GLs) are amphiphilic compounds which contain a hydrophilic head of one or more monosaccharide residues bound by a glycosidic linkage to a hydrophobic lipid tail. GLs can be found nearly in all vertebrate cells and body fl uids and above all on cellular membranes (Yu and Yanagisawa 2010) (Fig. 1). They are ubiquitously distributed in eukaryotic cell surface membranes usually associated to phospholipids and the most common are glycosphingolipids. More than 400 glycosphingolipids varieties have been identifi ed according to their sugar moiety structure. Since the lipid moiety is also extremely variable the number of existing glycosphingolipids is at least 10 times higher (Sonnino et al. 2009, Iwabuchi et al. 2010). Besides being structural components of cell membranes, glycolipids play an important role in cellular processes such as cell-cell interaction, cell signal transduction, cell proliferation, and cell recognition (Im et al. 2001).
