Glycoproteins Now and Then: A Personal Account

The present article opens with a brief summary of the current knowledge of glycoproteins and their medical applications, as compared to the almost complete ignorance of these substances during the first half of the century. The author then relates how he became interested in carbohydrates in the 1950s, and subsequently in glycoproteins. He focuses on the identification of soybean agglutinin as the first known plant protein of this class, to which a widely occurring N-linked oligomannoside is attached, and continues with an account of his work on the coral tree lectin that contains plant-specific N-glycans. Moving at the same time deep into lectin research, he describes the discovery of the crucial role of bacterial surface lectins in the initiation of infectious diseases, thus providing the rationale for the current attempts to use carbohydrates for antiadhesion therapy of such diseases. The article ends with a survey of the author’s contribution to spreading wide the knowledge of glycoproteins and of their great importance in biology and medicine.