Hexacosanoic acid (C26:0) (
1), a very long-chain fatty acid, is related to various diseases such as adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD), adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN) and atherosclerosis. As the level of
1 higher than the normal is related to diseases above, hexacosanoic acid (
1) and the ceramide
2, which contains
1, are thought to play an important role in various tissues. Hexacosanoic acid (
1) is known to be a waxy solid and to be hard to dissolve in water as well as organic solvents. Due to this physical property, it is not easy to handle hexacosanoic acid (
1) in a laboratory. Therefore, efficient chemical synthesis of the compounds
1 and
2 has not been reported. Here, we report a versatile synthetic method for hexacosanoic acid (
1) and the ceramide
2 containing the fatty acid
1. Synthesis of hexacosanoic acid (
1) was achieved by applying the coupling of two alkyl units as a key step. Ceramide
2 was efficiently synthesized by applying the reported procedure together with hexacosanoic acid (
1) synthesized here. This synthetic strategy has an advantage of getting various carbon chain length fatty acids and their ceramides by using a variety of carbon chain units. This method is also applicable for large-scale synthesis. In addition, these compounds
1 and
2 are useful for investigation of details of these compounds related to diseases such as ALD and AMN.
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