Glycobiology World Congress

Biography

Biography: Albert M. Wu

Abstract

Lectins are an important class of proteins or glycoproteins that specifically or selectively bind to carbohydrates and play many critical roles in life processes. In order to characterize recognition roles of lectins, the following aspects have been taken into consideration: i) lectins affinity to monosaccharides; ii) expression of reactivities toward oligosaccharides (mammalian structural units/recognition units) and finding the most active ligand. However, it is not satisfied, because most lectins with the same mono- or oligosaccharide specificity may demonstrate different specificities in reaction with polyvalent forms – it has even shown a shift of binding specificity of lectin from one type of carbohydrate ligand to another when the density of the specific carbohydrate changed. Therefore, characterization of lectin specificity has been extended to: iii) simple oligovalent or cluster effect; and iv) complex multivalent or cluster effects. Simple oligovalent effect concerns the reactivity of lectins with oligomeric glycoconjugates (e.g. branched oligosaccharides carrying several active disaccharides, glycopeptides with several Tα or Tn glycotopes). A complex multivalent effect applies to interaction with high-molecular or aggregated molecules carrying multiple glycotopes recognized by a lectin. In this talk, we are focusing on the resulting intensities of three basic recognition factors  (ii) essential mammalian structural units, (iii) their clusters and (iv) polyvalency in the recognition processes.