ABSTRACT
Joseph Alroy,1,* Min Fang,2,a Andrew G. Plaut3 and Gary Sahagian2,b
Lectins (from the Latin word legere, to select), are sugar-binding proteins or glycoproteins that agglutinate cells and/or precipitate glycoconjugates that have saccharides of appropriate complementarity (Table 1 and Alroy et al. 1984a). The interaction of lectins with particular carbohydrates can be as specifi c as the interaction between antigens and antibodies (Ghazarian et al. 2011). When lectins are conjugated directly or indirectly to a “visualant” so they can be detected on tissues, they are useful as probes for identifying the presence of specifi c carbohydrate residues in histological sections. A recent review highlighted the usefulness of both glycan-binding antibodies and lectins in the characterization of tissue glycoconjugates (Tang et al. 2015). This illustrated the difference in the expression of glycoconjugates in normal glomerulus and glomerulus of a patient with I cell disease, as shown in Figs. 1 and 2 (Castagnaro et al. 1987).
