The amount of each of the more than a thousand different glycoproteins in your blood varies widely with the 10 most abundant glycoproteins accounting for 90 percent of the total mass. Finding a protein that isn’t in this top 10 is a bit like looking for Waldo if only one rendition of the character remained in a collection of every “Where’s Waldo” comic ever produced.
This range of disparity in protein concentration is termed dynamic range, and it makes it more difficult for scientists to identify less-abundant proteins and their matching receptors.
Scientists published findings in Nature Communications demonstrating a strategy for identifying less-abundant proteins that bind with a specific type of receptor termed an endocytic lectin, and namely the mannose receptor Mrc1 (also known as CD206 and MMR). This approach enabled the research team to uncover hundreds of binding partners that together predicted Mrc1’s roles in our health.