page_title: Sulfatide
section_title: Cancer and tumor
hierarchical_section_title: Sulfatide / Role in pathological cells and tissue / Cancer and tumor
caption_attribution_description: English: High magnification micrograph of a primary lung adenocarcinoma showing nuclear staining with a TTF-1 immunostain.
context_page_description: Sulfatide, also known as 3-O-sulfogalactosylceramide, SM4, or sulfated galactocerebroside, is a class of sulfolipids, specifically a class of sulfoglycolipids, which are glycolipids that contain a sulfate group. Sulfatide is synthesized primarily starting in the endoplasmic reticulum and ending in the Golgi apparatus where ceramide is converted to galactocerebroside and later sulfated to make sulfatide. Of all of the galactolipids that are found in the myelin sheath, one fifth of them are sulfatide. Sulfatide is primarily found on the extracellular leaflet of the myelin plasma membrane produced by the oligodendrocytes in the central nervous system and in the Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system. However, sulfatide is also present on the extracellular leaflet of the plasma membrane of many cells in eukaryotic organisms.
  Since sulfatide is a multifunctional molecule, it can be used in multiple biological areas. Aside from being a membrane component, sulfatide functions in protein trafficking, cell aggregation and adhesion, neural plasticity, memory, and glial-axon interactions.
context_section_description: Elevated sulfatide is common in many tissues in the human body, including numerous cancer tissues and cells. These include:
  Primary colorectal cancer tissues
  Primary lung adenocarcinoma tissues
  Malignant and benign ovarian cancer tissues
  Renal carcinoma tissues
  Serous papillary ovarian carcinoma tissues
  Gastric cancer tissues
  Renal carcinoma (SMKT-R3 cell line)
  Sulfatide levels in these cancer lines and tissues may vary. For example, the levels of sulfatide are much lower in undifferentiated small cell carcinoma tissues and primary lung squamous cell carcinoma tissues in humans than in primary lung adenocarcinoma tissue in humans.  In human ovarian cancers, sulfatide levels are much higher in malignant ovarian cancers than in benign ovarian cancers. Other cancers such as Wilms’ tumor show no expression of sulfatide. Therefore, it appears that such increased levels of sulfatide are not universal in every form of cancer, and more experimentation must be done to confirm that elevated levels of sulfatide are not just artifacts of cultured cancer cell lines.
  However, experimentation using renal cancer cell lines has given some insight into the mechanism for the elevated levels of sulfatide expression in cancer cells. Specifically, cerebroside sulfotransferase (CST) is elevated as it passes along a signaling pathway which involves:
  Hepatocyte growth factor
  Epidermal growth factor
  Tyrosine kinases
  TNF-α
  Protein kinase C
  Ras
  This path results in the accumulation of sulfatide in renal cancer cell lines. Additionally, sulfatide can accumulate on the surface of cancer cells. This indicates that sulfatide may serve as a specific ligand for P-selectin. This would contribute to increased metastasis of the cancer. However, more research is needed to elucidate the relationship between the elevated levels of sulfatide expression and the initiation and metastasis mechanisms of cancer, but sulfatide may be a useful serum biomarker for early tumor detection.
caption: Primary Lung adenocarcinoma
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