ABSTRACT
Many plants accumulate so-called ‘lectins’, ‘agglutinins’ or ‘haemagglutinins’ in their seeds and vegetative tissues. Lectins can be defined as carbohydrate-binding proteins which recognise and bind specifically and reversibly to certain mono-or oligosaccharides without altering the structure of the bound ligand (Peumans and Van Damme, 1995; Van Damme et al., 1998a). In this way lectins are also able to interact with glycans of different glycoconjugates such as glycoproteins, glycolipids and oligo-or polysaccharides.
