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.
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Grubhoffer et al. (1997) studied this question.
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