Lectins and their applications in biomedical research

Lectins are nonimmunoglobulin, nonenzymatic carbohydrate-binding proteins that occur throughout the kingdoms of life. Many dozens of lectins can be expressed in a single organism, and they play important roles in biological processes, including immune recognition and response, cell–cell interactions, serum clearance, and glycoprotein synthesis. Lectins are the focus of much current research and development efforts in biomedical and clinical research. In this chapter, a general background of lectins is introduced and several examples of plant lectins widely used in biomedical research are discussed based on their different carbohydrate specificity along with some of their current biological research use. Microbial and human lectins are extensively discussed in later chapters and will not be discussed in detail in this chapter. The well-established current methodologies, which utilize lectins of agglutination assays, lectin histochemistry, affinity chromatography, enzyme-linked lectin assay, and lectin microarrays, will also be discussed.