Venkataraman Maha, Sasisekharan Ram, Raman Rahul
Department of Biological Engineering, Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT Building 76, Room 158, 500 Main Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
Methods Mol Biol. 2015;1273:181-90. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4939-2343-4_13.
Glycomics or the study of structure-function relationships of complex glycans has reshaped post-genomics biology. Glycans mediate fundamental biological functions via their specific interactions with a variety of proteins. Recognizing the importance of glycomics, large-scale research initiatives such as the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG) were established to address these challenges. Over the past decade, the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG) has generated novel reagents and technologies for glycomics analyses, which in turn have led to generation of diverse datasets. These datasets have contributed to understanding glycan diversity and structure-function relationships at molecular (glycan-protein interactions), cellular (gene expression and glycan analysis), and whole organism (mouse phenotyping) levels. Among these analyses and datasets, screening of glycan-protein interactions on glycan array platforms has gained much prominence and has contributed to cross-disciplinary realization of the importance of glycomics in areas such as immunology, infectious diseases, cancer biomarkers, etc. This manuscript outlines methodologies for capturing data from glycan array experiments and online tools to access and visualize glycan array data implemented at the CFG.
糖组学，即对复杂聚糖的结构-功能关系的研究，重塑了后基因组生物学。聚糖通过与多种蛋白质的特异性相互作用介导基本的生物学功能。认识到糖组学的重要性，人们建立了诸如功能糖组学协会（CFG）等大规模研究计划来应对这些挑战。在过去十年中，功能糖组学协会（CFG）已经开发出用于糖组学分析的新型试剂和技术，这些试剂和技术进而带来了各种数据集的产生。这些数据集有助于在分子（聚糖-蛋白质相互作用）、细胞（基因表达和聚糖分析）和整个生物体（小鼠表型分析）水平上理解聚糖的多样性和结构-功能关系。在这些分析和数据集中，在聚糖阵列平台上筛选聚糖-蛋白质相互作用备受关注，并有助于跨学科认识到糖组学在免疫学、传染病、癌症生物标志物等领域的重要性。本手稿概述了从聚糖阵列实验中获取数据的方法以及用于访问和可视化功能糖组学协会（CFG）实施的聚糖阵列数据的在线工具。
