glySpace: an integrated infrastructure for Glycoinformatics

University Of Georgia, Athens GA

Investigators

Abstract

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although glycans and glycoconjugates have diverse biological functions and play key roles in almost all biological processes, the scientific community has only recently begun to appreciate the relevance of these molecules to biomedicine. In large part, this is due to their structural complexity, making them difficult to characterize, and to the fact that glycans are not synthesized by a template-directed mechanism, making it extremely difficult predict their expression in any particular biological context. To make matters worse, currently available information about glycan structure and function is distributed across many databases, including databases that do not have glycobiology as their main focus. Thus, it is difficult to understand the relationships between these diverse but related data, which are rarely cross-referenced. Clearly, improved glycoinformatics resources are required to facilitate retrieval and integration of the different types of information required to understand the important functions of glycans and glycoconjugates in biology and medicine. We will address this challenge by developing the Glycobiology Information Browser (GIB), which will provide access to information about glycan structure, expression, biosynthesis and function as well as knowledge of other classes of molecules that interact/interface with glycans. Realization of the GIB will require us to build a significant amount of infrastructure, which we call the glySpace information network. Rather than creating a new database and populating it with data from existing resources, we plan to extend the existing resources to support a uniform strategy for data retrieval from all resources. Implementation of the glySpace network will require us to develop robust interfaces that enable access to information in consistent, machine-readable forms using common representations, standardized formats and semantically annotated terms. To this end, we will call upon accomplished scientists from the glycobiology and informatics communities to work together for the purpose of achieving consensus regarding the most important types of information to share and the forms that this information will take. This will result in the establishment of high-level technical specifications for the GIB and glySpace, leading to the submission of a collaborative research grant to fund their implementation. Success of this endeavor will unlock the field of glycobiology for scientists who are currently faced with a maze of disparate, unconnected sources of information about this emerging discipline and accelerate the progress of experienced glycoscientists toward understanding the roles of glycans and glycoconjugates in biological systems. We believe that construction of glySpace and the GIB is likely to have profound effects on the way glycobiology research is performed by the biomedical community.