Abstract
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the use of lectins to investigate photoreceptor membranes. Several laboratories have used lectins as probes of these oligosaccharides in the retina and pigment epithelium. Lectins are proteins, of plant origin, that display a remarkable binding specificity for certain haptene sugars. In the preceding instances it seems that the lectins have simple binding sites restricted to single terminal sugar units. However, the affinity of lectins for certain oligosaccharides is typically several orders of magnitude higher than for the most potent free hapten sugar. Lectins can also be used to identify the glycoproteins of photoreceptor membranes on sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)-polyacrylamide gels. Thus I-labeled wheat germ agglutinin (WGA) and I-labeled Con A have been used to show that the high-molecular-weight protein was a glycoprotein similar to rhodopsin with an oligosaccharide moiety containing sugar sequences having an affinity for Con A and WGA.
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