We still know only a fraction of their secrets, but this enlightenment has defined models for thinking about these compounds that remove them from their enigmatic “black box.” This changed radically over the past several decades as researchers explored, and ultimately established, what seemed at the time to be radical concepts: that sphingolipids are not just structural elements of cells but also participate in intra- and extracellular signaling that not only the complex glycan headgroups, but also the lipid backbones, are highly specified metabolically and have selective biochemical functions and that even the longest known function of these lipids, as structural components of the “fluid mosaic” of cell membrane lipids, is not so simple, and often involves the dynamic clustering of sphingolipids in nontraditional microdomains referred to as rafts. Thudichum’s colorful, and one could say clairvoyant, naming of sphingosine “in commemoration of the many enigmas which it presented to the inquirer” in his 1884 treatise The Chemistry of the Brain( 1) because many of the riddles of sphingolipids (as the broader field was later named)( 2) remained unanswered for the following century.
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