58] The isolation and purification of wheat germ and other agglutinins

Abstract

Publisher Summary Wheat germ agglutinin has been purified from raw wheat germ as well as from commercial wheat germ lipase preparations. The chapter describes a procedure that results in a purer preparation. In this purification procedure, raw wheat germ is used as a starting material, but commercial wheat germ lipase preparations can also be used as a starting material except that steps 1, 4, and 5 can be omitted. Agglutinating activity is monitored during and after the purification process with the assay. One unit of agglutinating activity is defined as the reciprocal of the amount of agglutinin that gave half-maximal agglutination. The use of different test cells can affect the activity of a unit. An amount of wheat germ agglutinin which has 470 units for L1210 leukemia cells, gives 700 units for human red blood group A cells and 180 units for blood group B cells, respectively.