A group from Institute of Chemistry, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia, etc. has reported that the combination of lectins (PHAE + HL sel) can detect only glycosylation changes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) and not with age.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8695905/
Here, reverse-phase lectin microarrays were used for the identification of changes in the serum glycome as potential CRC biomarkers.
What is the reverse-phase lectin microarrays:
Serum samples diluted 50× were spotted in different wells in triplicates using a microarray spotter on epoxide-coated slides. Subsequently, after spotting and blocking the slides, 70 μl of biotinylated lectins (5 μg/ml in PBS) was added and incubated at RT for 1 h. The slides were washed gently three times with PBS, and then 70 μl of streptavidin-fluorescent material conjugate (0.1 μg/ml in PBS) was added for 15 min. After a washing step and additional wash with deionized water, fluorescence intensity was read at 635 nm using a microarray reader.
Lectins used in this experiment:
AAL, RPL-Fuc1, PHAE, PHAL, ConA, DBA, WFL, WGA, RCAI, MAA, P sel, RPL-Sia2, SNAI, HPyL, HE sel, and HL sel
The lectin combination PHAE (specific to N-ghlycans with outer Gal and bisecting GlcNAc) + HL sel (specific to 6-O-Su sLex) provided the highest discrimination accuracy based on the AUC value (0.989).