The research in question was funded by the Scottish Office Agriculture, Environment and Fisheries Department from 1995 to December 1998 as part of a wider programme to examine efficacy and safety issues arising from the possible use of introduced lectins to increase pest resistance in crop plants. The work at the Scottish Crop Research Institute and Durham University was concerned with the production of transgenic plants, testing their resistance to pests and ensuring the absence of effects on harmless insects. Neither organisation was involved in the feeding studies made with rats at the Rowett other than to supply transgenic material. Lectins Lectin is the collective name for a group of proteins which have the common property of binding to specific carbohydrate structures found in body tissues. Virtually all known plants contain lectins, usually as one of a number of proteins in seeds, but often also distributed amongst the other parts of plants including leaves, roots and storage organs.
Lectins are present in most foods such as peas, beans, cereal grains, etc.
This is why kidney beans are always soaked and boiled before use, a process which effectively destroys the lectin, making beans fit for human consumption. Most of the other lectins that have been studied appear to have no discernible effect other than their ready attachment to the surface of intestinal cells. Work over the last 25 years has shown that lectins can play a role in resistance to insect and nematode pests in the plant, and that they are potentially important in crop protection. A simple screening procedure would therefore be valuable in allowing plant biotechnologists to assess whether genes coding for a potentially effective insecticidal lectin could be introduced into food plants with the confidence that it would be not be harmful if the plant were eaten by humans. The work at the Rowett was funded to address this issue.