Endogenous lectins as cell surface transducers.

Interactions between cells or between cell and substratum involve specific receptors and their ligands. Among the various cell surface receptors identified during the last decades, the carbohydrate-binding proteins, e.g., lectins are of peculiar interest because glycolipids, glycoproteins and proteoglycans have been shown to interact with lectins on the surface of animal cells. Animal lectins are recognized as molecules playing important roles in a variety of biological processes through binding to glycoconjugates and lectin-like receptors such as selectins, sialoadhesins (CD22, CD33), natural killer receptors (NKR-P1, CD69 and CD94/NKG2), hyaluronate receptors (CD44, RHAMM, ICAM-1), B-cell associated antigen (CD23, CD72), beta2 leukocyte integrin (CD11b/CD18) or the well-known receptors for mannose, mannose-6-phosphate or asialoglycoprotein have been suggested to be able to mediate the transfer of information from the outside to the inside of the cell. This review focuses on the most recent advances in our understanding of the molecular basis of "outside-in" signaling mediated by lectins. Lectin-like receptors are involved in signal transduction in a great variety of ways; at the molecular level, they mimic in most of the cases the function of growth factor receptor either coupled to tyrosine kinase activity or to heterotrimeric G protein. They lead to a multiplicity of cellular events following their activation depending on factors such as cellular type, species and/or tissue. Nevertheless the potential of surface lectins as transducers is emphasized by the observation that in a few cases lectin-like receptors induce either novel signal transduction mechanism or new intracellular events with regards to what it has been observed as a consequence of growth factor receptor activation. This observation brings the idea that lectins may offer, as cell surface transducers, an alternative or additional signaling potential to cell.