An array-based method to identify multivalent inhibitors.

Carbohydrate-protein interactions play a critical role in a variety of biological processes, and agonists/antagonists of these interactions are useful as biological probes and therapeutic agents. Most carbohydrate-binding proteins achieve tight binding through formation of a multivalent complex. Therefore, both ligand structure and presentation contribute to recognition. Since there are many potential combinations of structure, spacing, and orientation to consider and the optimal one cannot be predicted, high-throughput approaches for analyzing carbohydrate-protein interactions and designing inhibitors are appealing. In this report, we develop a strategy to vary neoglycoprotein density on a surface of a glycan array. This feature of presentation was combined with variations in glycan structure and glycan density to produce an array with approximately 600 combinations of glycan structure and presentation. The unique array platform allows one to distinguish between different types of multivalent complexes on the array surface. To illustrate the advantages of this format, it was used to rapidly identify multivalent probes for various lectins. The new array was first tested with several plant lectins, including concanavalin A (conA), Vicia villosa isolectin B4 (VVL-B(4)), and Ricinus communis agglutinin (RCA120). Next, it was used to rapidly identify potent multivalent inhibitors of Pseudomonas aeruginosa lectin I (PA-IL), a key protein involved in opportunistic infections of P. aeruginosa , and mouse macrophage galactose-type lectin (mMGL-2), a protein expressed on antigen presenting cells that may be useful as a vaccine targeting receptor. An advantage of the approach is that structural information about the lectin/receptor is not required to obtain a multivalent inhibitor/probe.