Carbohydrates

Overview

It is important to recognize the great diversity of monosaccharides commonly encountered in animals, plants, and microbes, as well as to organize them in a visually interesting style that also emphasizes their similarities and relatedness. This article discusses the nature of building blocks, monosaccharides, and monosaccharide derivatives—terms commonly used in discussing "glycomolecules" found in nature. See Cummings "a Periodic Table of Monosaccharides"
(Reference: Cummings RD (2024) Glycobiology, 34(1): cwad088).

GlyTouCan is the international glycan structure repository. This repository is a freely available, uncurated registry for glycan structures that assigns globally unique accession numbers to any glycan independent of the level of information provided by the experimental method used to identify the structure(s). Any glycan structure, ranging in resolution from monosaccharide composition to fully defined structures can be registered as long as there are no inconsistencies in the structure.
(Reference: Fujita A et al (2021) Nucleic Acids Res. 49(D1): D1529-D1533).

While GlyTouCan provides stable identifiers for referencing glycan structures, they are not organized semantically. GNOme, a glycan naming and subsumption ontology and a member of the OBOFoundry, organizes GlyTouCan accessions for automated reasoning and interactive browsing of glycan structures by subsumption. GNOme makes it quick and easy to discover glycans with a specific degree of characterization; provides a text-based table of common synonyms for specific structures and compositions; enumerates glycan subsumption relationships for automated reasoning; and assigns each glycan to well-defined categories based on their degree of characterization.
(Reference: Zhang W et al (2025) Anal Bioanal Chem. 417(10): 1961-1973).

GlyTouCan

GlyTouCan is the international glycan structure repository. This repository is a freely available, uncurated registry for glycan structures that assigns globally unique accession numbers to any glycan independent of the level of information provided by the experimental method used to identify the structure(s). Any glycan structure, ranging in resolution from monosaccharide composition to fully defined structures, can be registered as long as there are no inconsistencies in the structure.
(Reference: Fujita A et al (2021) Nucleic Acids Res. 49(D1): D1529-D1533).

GNOme

While GlyTouCan provides stable identifiers for referencing glycan structures, they are not organized semantically. GNOme, a glycan naming and subsumption ontology and a member of the OBOFoundry, organizes GlyTouCan accessions for automated reasoning and interactive browsing of glycan structures by subsumption. GNOme makes it quick and easy to discover glycans with a specific degree of characterization, provides a text-based table of common synonyms for specific structures and compositions, enumerates glycan subsumption relationships for automated reasoning, and assigns each glycan to well-defined categories based on their degree of characterization.
(Reference: Zhang W et al (2025) Anal Bioanal Chem. 417(10): 1961-1973).

GlyGen

GlyGen is a data integration and dissemination project for carbohydrate and glycoconjugate related data. GlyGen retrieves information from multiple international data sources and integrates and harmonizes this data. This web portal allows exploring this data and performing unique searches that cannot be executed in any of the integrated databases alone. Tools available include Glycan Sequence Lookup, Glycan Structure Dictionary, GlycoMotif Wiki, GlyGen BLAST, GlyGen Mapper, and GlyGen Isoform Mapper.
(Reference: York WS et al. (2019) Glycobiology 30(2): 72–73).

GLYCAM

GLYCAM (Robert J. Woods, Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, University of Georgia, U.S.A.) provides tools that help answer questions such as: What are the shapes of my glycan? What glycans bind to my protein? How does my antibody recognize its glycan antigen? How does glycosylation affect my protein? It also allows users to search for glycans in the PDB.

CSDB

CSDB (Carbohydrate Structure Database) was merged from the Bacterial (BCSDB) and Plant & Fungal (PFCSDB) databases. CSDB contains manually curated natural carbohydrate structures, taxonomy, bibliography, NMR, and other literature data.
(Reference: Ph.V. Toukach & K.S Egorova. Nucleic Acids Res (Database Issue) 44(D1): D1229-D1236).

GLAD

GLAD (GLycan Array Dashboard) is a web-based tool to visualize, analyze, present, and mine glycan microarray data. GLAD allows users to input multiple data files to create comparisons. It extends the capability of microarray data to produce comparative visualizations in the form of grouped bar charts, heatmaps, calendar heatmaps, force graphs, and correlation maps in order to analyze broad sets of samples.
(Reference: Mehta YA & Cummings RD (2019) Bioinformatics, 35(18): 3536–3537).

GlycoGlyph

GlycoGlyph is a web application capable of drawing glycan structures using a GUI and providing the linear nomenclature as an output or using it as an input dynamically. GlycoGlyph also allows users to save structures as SVG vector graphics and export the structure as condensed GlycoCT.
(Reference: Mehta YA & Cummings RD (2020) Bioinformatics, 36(11): 3613–3614).

ChemSpider

ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database providing fast access to over 100 million structures, properties, and associated information. By integrating and linking compounds from hundreds of high-quality data sources, ChemSpider enables researchers to discover a comprehensive view of freely available chemical data from a single online search. It is owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Chem-Space

Chem-Space uses Marvin JS from Chemaxon to draw chemical structures. Once completed, users can search the database of 1.8 billion chemicals for an exact match, a substructure match, or a similar structure.