THE PURIFICATION OF LECTINS IN DIFFERENT SPECIES OF GENUM

LINUM L.
Hanna Levchuk 1, 2, Victor Lyakh1, Maria Manuela Ribeiro Costa2
1Chair

of Land-Scape Industry and Plant Genetics, Department of Biology, Zaporizhzhya

National University, Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine

2BioSystems

& Integrative Sciences Institute (BioISI), Plant Functional Biology Center,

University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal

anna.levchuck@yandex.ua

Flax is considered to be among the most valuable industrial crops. As a raw material, it is
being largely used in textile, food, paints and varnishes industries. The diversity of the crop
application requires breeding new varieties with valuable economical and biological parameters.
Fulfillment of both intraspecies and interspecies hybridization is required for creating innovative
varieties with valuable features. Wild species of oil flax can boast of larger variety of economical
and valuable features, which is oil consistency and disease resistance, and can be used to create
novel tolerant plants.
However, a large number of wild flax species are cross-pollinated plants and have different
adaptation to cross-pollination. One of those peculiar features is dimorphic heterostyly.
Heterostyled species of Linum genus have two forms of flowers: short- and long-styled. It has been
determined that crossing only short- or long-styled flowers is rare (self-incompatibility), so they
appear to be heterostyly. Also it has been shown that obtaining interspecies hybrids with other wild
species by way of ordinary hybridization is not successful. [Lyakh et al., 2008].
Lectins are bioactive proteins able to identify and make backward coupling with the
carbohydrate residues on the cell surface [Lutsyk et al., 1981]. Due to this specific feature, lectins
are involved in the regulation of the wide variety of plant physiological processes such as
proliferation and differentiation processes [Bezrukova et al., 2004], seed sprouting, photosynthesis
[Aleksidze et al., 2002] and respiration processes [Vyskrebentseva et al., 1990], as well as pistilpollen recognition [Golynskaya et al., 1979]. One possibility is that the mechanisms regulating selfincompatibility phenomenon in flax might be mediated by lectins.
We have optimized the protocol for the purification of lectins from seven different flax species
L. usitatissimum, L. bienne, L. grandiflorum, L. perenne, L. thracicum, L. angustifolium, L.
hispanicum. We have used affinity chromatography with two resins sephacryl (containing
glucose) and superose (containing galactose) and we found that the use of a 10% (w/v) solution of
glucose and galactose were the most effective eluents, respectively. Using an agglutination assay
and SDS-PAGE, it was confirmed that lectins bound with both resins.