Handling and conversion of carbohydrate sequence formats and monosaccharide notation.

Various glycobioinformatics resources have developed individual carbohydrate sequence formats to store and handle glycan data. This diversity of sequence formats is one of the major reasons for a rather low interoperability of glycobioinformatics resources. The formats have often been optimized to serve special requirements of the individual resources and are thus not fully compatible, but in many cases translation from one format to another is possible. This chapter summarizes some of the major glycan sequence formats and demonstrates the use of tools for translation between these formats. Some pitfalls that users of sequence conversion tools need to pay attention to are also illustrated.