Glycans are known as the third major biomolecules, next to DNA and proteins, and they have been found to be involved in various important biological functions. The structure of glycans, however, differs greatly from DNA and proteins in that they are branched, as opposed to linear sequences of amino acids or nucleotides. Therefore, the storage of glycan information in databases, let alone their curation, has been a difficult problem.<br/>This has caused efforts in the integration of glycan data between different databases difficult, making an international repository for glycan structures, where unique accession numbers are assigned to every identified glycan structure, necessary. As such, an international team of developers and glycobiologists have collaborated to develop this repository, called GlyTouCan, which has been released this year and is freely available at http://glytoucan.org/, to provide a centralized resource for depositing glycan structures, compositions and topologies, and to retrieve accession numbers for each of these registered entries.<br/>GlyTouCan has been developed based on Semantic Web technologies, providing links to other major glycan databases such as GlycomeDB and BCSDB, using RDF. The RDF data of linked resources in GlyTouCan use GlycoRDF, an ontology to represent glycomics data. Moreover, the glycan structure representation called WURCS is used as the main format for storing glycans, thus ensuring uniqueness of even ambiguous glycan structures while representing them as linear strings. This allows for efficient searching of the repository for existing structures because a simple text comparison can be used. In addition, an enhancement of WURCS as an RDF representation allows a glycan structure to be searched using a SPARQL query.<br/>As a result, GlyTouCan enables researchers to reference glycan structures simply by accession number, as opposed to by chemical structure or text string, which has been a burden to integrate glycomics databases in the past. Moreover, GlyTouCan is being supported by the MIRAGE initiative, recommending that its accession numbers be used when reporting glycomics experiments in publications that include identified glycan structures. This will also allow easier identification of glycan structures in publications.<br/>Thus, in the future, not only can GlyTouCan serve as a central registry, but it can serve as a portal to search for glycan-related publications as well as other biological information.

GlyTouCan international glycan structure repository using semantic web technologies

251st National Meeting (2016)

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