Microbial Lectin-Targeting Mucus: A Glycobioinformatic Approach

The motifs exposed on surface glycans of mucins serve as receptors to a range of proteins expressed by microorganisms. The specificity of microbial glycan-binding proteins, i.e., lectins, towards human mucin epitopes is the result of co-evolution. The binding of microbes to mucins is described in several databases hosted on the UniLectin portal. In particular, UniLectin3D provides structural details on the recognition process and LectomeXplore allows for the identification of putative lectins in the genomes of mucin-associated microbiome species. The usage of these resources is illustrated in this chapter.