Lectins

Highly purified, quality-controlled lectins for glycobiology and other applications

Lectins from plants and fungi are a defensive mechanism of these species to keep out invading proteins, cells, and organisms. These proteins have evolved to preferentially recognize carbohydrate structures, including those found on mammalian cells and tissues. The specificity of each lectin can be harnessed as a tool to affect and probe the complex glycans of biological systems and indeed, this quality and other unique properties have made lectins powerful tools for researchers. Vector Laboratories offers you over 125 lectin binding assays for:

• Glycobiology
• Immunohistochemistry (IHC)
• Immunocytochemistry (ICC)
• Immunofluorescence (IF)
• Blotting applications 
• ELISAs and more

All lectins are highly purified and subjected to intensive quality control to ensure you have the best lectins available on the market.

Validation data from the National Center for Functional Glycomics (NCFG)

At Vector Laboratories, we employ a variety of procedures to purify our lectins and thereby ensure that they are of the highest quality. A selection of Vector Laboratories’ lectin products is also validated by the National Center for Functional Glycomics (NCFG) using the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG) glycan arrays. The NCFG analyzes the glycan specificity of each lectin lot and makes the data available to the public on the NCFG website. The goal of this NCFG project is to support rigorous and reproducible glycobiology experiments and these data provide uniquely valuable insights into the glycan structures on the glycoproteins you are studying. For example,

• Binding specificity of each lectin, for each of the hundreds of glycan structures in the array
• Data tabulated and conveniently summarized as a binding array, with peak height indicating degree of binding for each glycan
• Specific and detailed data on complex carbohydrate structure
• Lot-specific data — for confidence in the reproducibility of your binding data