Glomalin is a hypothetical glycoprotein produced abundantly on hyphae and spores of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi in soil and in roots. Glomalin was proposed in 1996 by Sara F. Wright, a scientist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, but it was not isolated and described yet. The name comes from Glomerales, an order of fungi. Most AM fungi are of the division Glomeromycota. An elusive substance, it is mostly assumed to have a glue-like effect on soil, but it has not been isolated yet.
Glomalin is a hypothetical glycoprotein produced abundantly on hyphae and spores of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi in soil and in roots. Glomalin was proposed in 1996 by Sara F. Wright, a scientist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, but it was not isolated and described yet. The name comes from Glomerales, an order of fungi. Most AM fungi are of the division Glomeromycota. An elusive substance, it is mostly assumed to have a glue-like effect on soil, but it has not been isolated yet.
== Definition and controversy == The specific protein glomalin has not yet been isolated and described. What has been described is an extraction process involving heat and citrate, producing a mixture containing a substance that is reactive to a monoclonal antibody Mab32B11 raised against crushed AM fungi spores. The substance is then provisionally named "glomalin". As many laboratories do not have the equipment to perform an antibody-based isolation (ELISA), a crude mixture called glomalin-related soil proteins (GRSP) is used to refer to the extract portion reactive to the Bradford protein assay. There is significant confusion between the ideal glomalin protein, the antibody-reactive extract portion termed "glomalin", and GRSP.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).