SPTLC1 and neuropathy: In addition to identifying possible therapeutic interventions, the potential promise of using metabolite profiling to understand disease mechanisms including neuropathies is demonstrated by recent work on serine palmitoyltransferase long-chain base subunits 1 and 2 (SPTLC1 and 2), a heterodimeric enzyme that links palmitoylate onto serine at an early step in complex sphingolipid biosynthesis.