Yusufi Faraaz Noor Khan, Park Wonjun, Lee May May, Lee Dong-Yup
Bioprocessing Technology Institute, Biomedical Sciences Institutes, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore.
Bioprocess Biosyst Eng. 2009 Jan;32(1):97-107. doi: 10.1007/s00449-008-0226-4. Epub 2008 May 6.
Advances in high-throughput techniques have led to the creation of increasing amounts of glycome data. The storage and analysis of this data would benefit greatly from a compact notation for describing glycan structures that can be easily stored and interpreted by computers. Towards this end, we propose a fixed-length alpha-numeric code for representing N-linked glycan structures commonly found in secreted glycoproteins from mammalian cell cultures. This code, GlycoDigit, employs a pre-assigned alpha-numeric index to represent the monosaccharides attached in different branches to the core glycan structure. The present branch-centric representation allows us to visualize the structure while the numerical nature of the code makes it machine readable. In addition, a difference operator can be defined to quantitatively differentiate between glycan structures for further analysis. The usefulness and applicability of GlycoDigit were demonstrated by constructing and visualizing an N-linked glycosylation network.
高通量技术的进步导致了越来越多聚糖数据的产生。对于这些数据的存储和分析，若能有一种紧凑的符号来描述聚糖结构，使其易于被计算机存储和解读，将大有裨益。为此，我们提出一种固定长度的字母数字编码，用于表示在哺乳动物细胞培养物分泌糖蛋白中常见的N - 连接聚糖结构。这种编码GlycoDigit采用预先分配的字母数字索引来表示连接在核心聚糖结构不同分支上的单糖。当前以分支为中心的表示方式使我们能够可视化结构，而编码的数字性质使其具有机器可读性。此外，可以定义一个差分算子来定量区分聚糖结构以进行进一步分析。通过构建和可视化一个N - 连接糖基化网络，证明了GlycoDigit的实用性和适用性。
