Vector Laboratories’ Glysite Explorer Highly Commended for 2026 CiteAb Innovation Award
Vector Laboratories has been highly commended for the 2026 CiteAb Innovation Award, recognizing the impact of the Glysite Explorer in situ PLA Glycan Detection Kit in advancing glycosylation research.
Presented annually by CiteAb, the Innovation Award highlights technologies that meaningfully improve how scientists study complex biological systems. Being recognized reflects a broader shift in life science research: the growing need for tools that help researchers investigate protein glycosylation with spatial precision, not just glycan composition in a sample.
Protein glycosylation is one of the most widespread and biologically important post-translational modifications. Glycans influence cell signaling, immune recognition, and disease progression across many biological systems. Yet despite its importance, glycosylation remains difficult to study. Glycan structures are heterogeneous, dynamic, and not directly encoded by the genome, which makes them challenging to analyze using conventional molecular biology approaches.
Established techniques such as mass spectrometry and flow cytometry have enabled important advances in glycobiology, but they typically generate compositional or population-level data. While powerful, these methods often lack spatial information, limiting insight into where glycosylation occurs within tissues or how glycan patterns vary between different cell types within complex microenvironments.
For many researchers, bridging that gap has required custom workflows that combine glycan-binding molecules with generic detection systems through chemical conjugation. These “homebrew” methods introduce technical variability and demand expertise that many laboratories do not have.
The Glysite Explorer in situ PLA Glycan Detection Kit, launched in July 2025 by Vector Laboratories (read the press release for more information), was developed to address this challenge by providing a standardized platform for studying glycan-protein proximity directly within biological samples.
The system combines validated Glysite Explorer Lectins with in situ Proximity Ligation Assay (isPLA) technology from Navinci to enable detection of glycosylated proteins within their native spatial context. Using a workflow similar to immunostaining and compatible with standard microscopy pipelines, the assay allows researchers to visualize glycan-protein interactions in tissues and cells without the need for complex assay development.
Early adopters have already demonstrated the value of this approach. Researchers from the Barthel and Schatton laboratories at Harvard Medical School noted: “Without this product, we would not have been able to easily characterize diverse glycan structures on the cellular target protein of interest or compare glycan motifs across distinct cell types of the tumor microenvironment.”
As glycobiology continues to gain recognition for its role in disease mechanisms, biomarker discovery, and therapeutic development, new tools that make spatial glycosylation analysis more accessible will play an important role in advancing the field.
Recognition from CiteAb highlights the growing importance of technologies that help researchers move beyond traditional analytical approaches to study glycosylation where it occurs—in the complex architecture of real biological systems.
Learn more about how the Glysite Explorer in situ PLA Glycan Detection Kit and other glycobiology reagents from Vector Laboratories enable exploration of protein glycosylation in health and disease with the following resources:
