Interestingly, the MAA signals did not colocalized with the mucin-expressing cells (ratio of MAA + /mucin + cells, 0.00760.01, n = 223) (Fig. 1D) , indicating that goblet cells may not express the SAa2-3Gal glycans which show high affinity to the MAA lectin. However, for the immunohistochemistry in tissue sections, the distribution of SAa2-3Gal expression may show inconsistent distribution when different MAA/MALs were applied or the same lectins were from different providers [16, 17] . To further address the SA expression on goblet cells, MAL-I, same as MAA, was given by Vector Laboratories and applied to stain the CTE cells. We found that abundant MAL-I was detected on the b-tubulin + cells (ratio of MAL-1 + /b-tubulin + cells, 0.8260.10, n = 301) (Fig. S1), rather than the mucin + cells (ratio of MAL-1 + /mucin + cells, 0.0260.02, n = 201) (Fig. 1E ), similar to the result for MAA.