Abstract
Lectins: Carbohydrate-specific Reagents and Biological Recognition Molecules
Highlights
Back at Rehovot my original aim was to establish the structure of that diamino sugar; I was fortunate to receive for this purpose my first National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, a modest one of some $25,000 for 3 years. (This would have been unheard of at the present time because nothing was known about the function of the compound.) The task took me over a decade; eventually we were able to prove by degradation and synthesis that the compound in question, which we named bacillosamine, is 2,4-diamino-2,4,6-trideoxy-Dglucose [8, 9]
As the 1960s were folding, the attitude toward lectins began to change, and a number of leading biochemists and immunologists, among them Gerald Edelman at Rockefeller University, Mel Greaves at London University, Elvin Kabat at Columbia University, Jerker Porath at Uppsala, and Jon Singer at University of California, San Diego, became involved with them. The reasons for this change in attitude were summarized by Kabat, who had become intrigued with lectins primarily because their combining sites seemed similar to those of antibodies and who in 1977 stated: “During the past 10 years there has been an extraordinary burst of activity in the study of plant and animal lectins, stimulated largely by the findings that they have specific receptor sites for carbohydrates and react with glycoproteins in solution or on cell membranes . . . ” [24]
The Science review was completed jointly with Halina upon my return to Rehovot early in 1972 [13]. It summarized the history of the research on lectins since their discovery, their specificity for monosaccharides and cells, and the properties of concanavalin A and the few other lectins that had been purified at the time
Summary
My own involvement with these proteins began inadvertently and initially on a part-time basis in the early 1960s after my return to the Weizmann Institute from two and a half years of exciting and educational postdoctoral studies in the United States. I spent the second postdoctoral year at the Massachusetts General Hospital with Roger Jeanloz, a leading carbohydrate chemist, where I got my training in the subject and succeeded in isolating an unusual diamino sugar from a Bacillus polysaccharide I had brought with me from Rehovot [4] (see below); the remaining time I worked with Dan Koshland at Brookhaven National Laboratory on the mechanism of action of myosin ATPase [5, 6]. By a strange twist of fate, most of these glycoproteins were originally isolated in 2002 by Martin Young and his colleagues at the National Research Laboratories, Ottawa, from Campylobacter jejuni by affinity chromatography on immobilized soybean agglutinin (SBA) [11], the first lectin I got involved with 40 years earlier
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