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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2016 Oct 1.
Published in final edited form as: Biochim Biophys Acta. 2015 Jan 26;1853(10 0 0):2834–2845. doi: 10.1016/j.bbamcr.2014.12.039

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Ceramide metabolic pathways. Ceramide lies at the center of sphingolipid metabolism. Ceramide de novo generation starts with a condensation reaction involving Serine and Palmitoyl CoA by the enzyme Serine Palmitoyl CoA Transferase (SPT), to generate 3-ketosphinganine, which is then converted to sphinganine or dihydrosphingosine. Then, Ceramide Synthases (CerS1-6) transfer a fatty acyl CoA to the amino group yielding dihydroceramide which gets desaturated to ceramide by Dihydro-ceramide Desaturase enzyme (DES). Ceramide can be generated back from Sphingosine-1-phosphate with the help of S1P phosphatase (S1PP) and ceramide synthase (salvage pathway) or from Sphingomyelin by Sphingomyelinase (SMase), from Glycosphingolipids, or from Ceramide-1-phosphate by Ceramide kinase (Cer-Kinase). As a metabolic outlet for ceramide, it is converted to sphingosine by the action of ceramidase. Sphingosine kinases 1 and 2 (SK1/2) phosphorylate sphingosine to sphingosine-1-phosphate that can be further degraded by S1P lyase to hexadecanal and ethanolamine phosphate.