| Recently, there has been a surge of interest in glycobiology upon realization of the important roles that carbohydrates play in many biological processes. Lectins are a group of proteins of non-immune origin that can recognize and bind to specific carbohydrates. Because of their unique ability to identify carbohydrates, lectins have been widely used to decode the biological information encoded in carbohydrates.; In this thesis, a new strategy is presented for carbohydrate analysis which combines the parallelism of microarray format assays with the lectins' specific recognition of carbohydrates. Lectin arrays, were fabricated on modified gold substrates and were used to profile carbohydrate expression on glycoproteins as well as on mammalian cell surfaces by simple observation of the binding patterns of proteins or cells to the arrays. Glycoproteins and mammalian cells exhibited characteristic binding patterns to lectin arrays, providing useful information about their glycosylation states.; Exploratory work using lectin-conjugated microchannels for small scale cell separations was also carried out. In a model system of mixed MB-231 and BHK-21 cells, the MB-231 cells, which have higher affinity to Sambucus Nigra Lectin (SNA), were enriched up to 10 fold in SNA-modified microchannels. The results clearly demonstrated the potential of lectin-modified microchannels as a novel device for small scale cell separation, and will be applied for mouse mammary stem cell enrichment to avoid problems associated with current enrichment protocols. |
