A new efficient and flexible synthesis of fluorescently labeledsphingosine derivatives from commercially available Garneraldehyde (
8) is described. For this, appropriate alkenylatedborondipyrromethene (BODIPY) dyes were synthesized andused for the first time in a cross-metathesis reaction, the keystep of the approach. The labeled sphingosines with appropriate chain length were accepted as substrates bysphingosine kinases (SPHKs), yielding the correspondingphosphorylated products. One of these derivatives (
11d) wasidentified as the first reported selective substrate forSPHK-1.