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Gangliosides are a large family of glycosphingolipids that are abundant in the brain, and have been shown to affect neuronal plasticity during development, adulthood, and aging. We developed a fast, efficient, and sensitive liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry method to quantify eight different classes of gangliosides (GM(1), GM(2), GM(3), GD(3), GD(1a), GD(1b), GT(1b), GQ(1b)) in the brains of 2-day-old and 80-day-old Wistar rats. The gangliosides were extracted from rat brain using a modified Svennerholm and Fredman method. After ganglioside class separation using a hydrophilic high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) column, the resolving power of the LTQ-Orbitrap mass spectrometer was used to extract and sum the major species of each ganglioside class, generating fully resolved extracted ion current peaks for both standards and samples. The flexibility and the specificity of this method are such that it can be applied to the analysis of other ganglioside species/classes not discussed in this paper, provided appropriate standards are available. The method had good repeatability (coefficient of variation 4.8-12.3%) and mean recoveries in the range 92-107%.

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