Neurological analyses: focus on gangliosides and mass spectrometry.

Gangliosides, sialylated glycosphingolipids, are particularly enriched in mammalian central nervous system where their expression is cell type-specific and changes particularly during brain development, maturation, aging, and diseases. For this reason, gangliosides are important diagnostic markers for various brain ailments, including primary and secondary brain tumors and neurodegenerative diseases. Among all biochemical and biophysical methods employed so far for ganglioside analysis, mass spectrometry (MS) emerged as one of the most reliable due to the sensitivity, accuracy, and speed of analysis as well as the possibility to characterize in details the molecular structure of the identified biomarkers.