The Tridacna Lectins

Ten years before we discovered the Tridacna lectins, the background work which led to this event, was begun by Prof. Otto Prokop in Berlin. He found and described the first well-characterized invertebrate lectins in the garden and in the land snail albumin gland, and also in the eggs of these snails (for review see Prokop and Uhlenbruck 1970). As a byproduct of those investigations, the snails galactans (May and Weinbrenner 1938) were rediscovered and a new group of protease inhibitors were detected, because the Helix pomatia lectin seemed to be indigestible (Uhlenbruck et al. 1971).