The review is devoted to the gut lectins/hemagglutinins of the following representatives of important disease vectors: ticks, kissing-bugs, mosquitoes, sandflies and tsetse flies. The paper surveys the recent knowledge on these carbohydrate binding factors with respect to their structural and functional properties, and their significance for pathogen/parasite transmission by the blood-sucking arthropods. Recent results suggest that in most vectors the gut lectin activities are blood-meal enhanced, might participate in blood-meal processing and digestion and could serve as antibacterial and antiparasitic agents.

Institute of Parasitology Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Faculty of Biological Sciences University of South Bohemia Czech Republic

References provided by Crossref.org

Insight into the sialome of the castor bean tick, Ixodes ricinus