Glycome Atlas
Glycome pillar
The standards, registries, instruments, and analytical methods used to identify and compare glycans.
Glycomics is the study of all the sugar chains a cell, tissue, or organism makes, taken together as one collection called the glycome. Just as genomics looks at the full set of genes and proteomics at the full set of proteins, glycomics tries to identify and measure the many different carbohydrate structures attached to proteins and fats across a biological sample.
Read reviewed entryGlycoproteomics is a method that identifies which proteins carry sugar chains, exactly where on the protein those sugars sit, and what the sugar structures are, all at the same time. It keeps the sugar attached to the protein fragment so the analysis links the glycan to its specific location rather than looking at proteins and sugars separately.
Read reviewed entryGlyTouCan is the international registry that gives each glycan structure a unique ID, called an accession. It works like a catalog number so that scientists and databases can refer to exactly the same structure without ambiguity.
Read reviewed entryA lectin array is a chip printed with many sugar-binding proteins called lectins. When a sample is applied, the pattern of which lectins light up gives a fingerprint of the sugars present, without needing to sequence each structure.
Read reviewed entryMass-spectrometry glycan analysis weighs sugar molecules very precisely to work out what they are made of. Sugar chains are usually cut off their parent proteins or lipids first, then measured by their mass, and often broken into pieces so the instrument can read the order of the building blocks.
Read reviewed entryThe Symbol Nomenclature for Glycans, or SNFG, is a standard set of colored shapes for drawing sugars. A blue square always means one sugar, a green circle another, so scientists everywhere can read glycan diagrams the same way.
Read reviewed entry