Structural and conformational features that affect the interaction of polylactosaminoglycans with immobilized wheat germ agglutinin.

We examined the interaction between immobilized wheat germ agglutinin and the large, polylactosamine-containing glycans from human erythrocytes and human K-562 erythroleukemic cells. Three classes of interaction were identified. One class of glycan was merely retarded during chromatography. The other two classes were retained and could be distinguished by their ease of displacement with N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc); one was a moderate-affinity fraction displaced by 0.1 M GlcNAc and the other was a high-affinity fraction subsequently displaced by 1.0 M GlcNAc. A relatively small fraction of the K-562 polylactosamines were in the high-affinity class. We explored the role that fucose and sialic acid substitutions play in the strength of the lectin-glycan interaction. Although sialic acid is recognized by wheat germ agglutinin, sialylation was not required for the high-affinity interaction, and the presence of sialic acids actually prevented some glycans from binding with high affinity. In contrast, fucose is not part of the binding determinant, yet the removal of fucose resulted in decreased affinity. The possibility that some of these changes in affinity were the result of conformational changes was explored using matrices that had wheat germ agglutinin immobilized at different densities. At low wheat germ agglutinin densities, adult and fetal erythroglycans and K-562 glycophorin-like glycans were not retained by the matrix. As the density increased, the proportion of glycans that were retarded, and ultimately retained, increased. While these increases in the proportions retained occurred in parallel for the three different glycans, the apparent affinities of the glycan-lectin interactions differed. The glycophorin-like glycans were always readily displaced by 0.1 M GlcNAc, even at higher wheat germ agglutinin densities. In contrast, as the wheat germ agglutinin density increased, the proportion of erythroglycans that could be displaced by 0.1 M GlcNAc decreased; at 10 mg/ml immobilized wheat germ agglutinin, greater than 80% of the erythroglycans exhibited this tighter interaction. We suggest that this higher affinity interaction is the result of the large glycans spanning adjacent wheat germ agglutinin molecules, and is determined by the proximity of these molecules and the conformation of the glycans.