<br/>The IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is a well-known notation for chemical substances that can be applied to many types of chemical structures. Recently, InChI has been trying to cover a variety of substances such as mixtures, metal-complexes, tautomers, etc., which is very important in chemical fields. By using InChI/InChIKey, chemical databases can be easily developed and allows linking between many database resources. However, carbohydrate structures can not be covered by the InChI system at this time.<br/>In the field of glycobiology, monosaccharides are considered the basic unit of carbohydrates, similar to nucleic acids of DNA and amino acids of proteins. However, carbohydrates are more complex than these linear biomolecules because of their branched structure, where multiple monosaccharides can attach glycosidic bonds to the same parent monosaccharide. Moreover, carbohydrate structures are difficult to determine distinctly. Various structures that can be considered carbohydrates are published in the literature, such as monosaccharide compositions, structures with undefined glycosidic bonds, and those having underdetermined capping units.<br/>We have developed a new representation method focusing on carbohydrate structures called WURCS (Web3 Unique Representation Carbohydrate Structures). WURCS can represent all different kinds of carbohydrate structures, as described above, which can all be described as unique strings. Therefore, WURCS can be used to identify carbohydrate structures.<br/>We have been developing the International Glycan Structure Repository, GlyTouCan, which assigns unique accession numbers to glycan structures that are published in the literature. WURCS and related tools which we have developed are used as the foundation of GlyTouCan. Because GlyTouCan is now being officially recognized as the standard repository for carbohydrate structures, WURCS will become an important notation for uniquely representing glycans in the future.

Notation for identification of glycans contained in glycoproteins, glycolipids, and other biomolecular structure data

2019 Fall National Meeting

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