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.

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys and colleagues at Scripps Research Institute published findings July 7, 2025, 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. This approach enabled the research team to uncover hundreds of binding partners that together predicted Mrc1’s roles in our health.

H5N1 avian influenza virus was first found infecting cattle in 2024, though its risk of adapting to infect and spread through humans has been unclear. Findings show that these influenza viruses from cows more closely resemble the molecular features of avian flu viruses than their human counterparts.