Kiyoko Aoki-Kinoshita (Presenting Author) | Soka University | 1-236 Tangi-machi, Hachioji, 192-8577, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
Glycans are found on the cell surface of every cell in the body, and as such, they are the first site of encounter for viruses, bacteria, hormones, and other cells. Thus, they are important factors to understand in biological processes. Historically, however, these molecules have been disregarded due to their complexity. In contrast to DNA and proteins, they are branched molecular chains of monosaccharides, some of which may be further modified. However, recent progress in mass spectrometry and other technologies have enabled semi-high-throughput identification of glycans, at least at the level of monosaccharide compositions. Thus, it is now possible to identify glycosylation sites on proteins and the compositions of the glycans at those sites. In order to ensure consistency in data reporting of these experimental data, the MIRAGE guidelines have been outlined to provide a basis for reporting of glycomics and glycoproteomics experiments, in addition to other experimental techniques involving glycans such as liquid chromatography, glycan and lectin arrays and NMR. For glycomics (a term hereafter used to include glycoproteomics) experiments, we have been developing the GlycoPOST repository to assign accession numbers to MS raw data for publication. GlycoPOST is a part of the GlyCosmos Portal, which is a Web portal aiming to comprehensively integrate glycan-related omics information. It currently contains almost 140,000 entries of glycoproteins across all species, and over 240,000 glycan entries, which range from monosaccharide compositions to fully-defined glycan structures. The data in GlyCosmos has been integrated from UniProt, Reactome, PubChem and the Alliance of Genome Resources, such that users can investigate the glycan-related across these resources. Tools are also available for understanding how glycan-related gene expression affects glycosylation profiles.
