Figure 1

Representation of the major players in the ceramide metabolism pathways. Enzymes are in italics with the genes characterized as part of this study in bold: serine palmitoyltransferase, 3-ketodihydrosphingosine reductase, ceramide glucosyltransferase, and acid ceramidase. Enzymes involved in the de novo synthesis of ceramide are in purple. Those implicated in the enzymatic break-down of ceramide are in green and the enzymes responsible for ceramide’s catabolic generation are in blue. Genes that were discovered in the Crassostrea gigas transcriptome using bioinformatics have a superscript “Cg” in orange. The pathway is adapted from[2, 15].