CARBOHYDRATES

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).

 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. Glycan Sequence Lookup, Glycan Structure Dictionary, GlycoMotif Wiki, GlyGen BLAST, GlyGen Mapper,  GlyGen Isoform Mapper etc. (Reference: York WS et al. (2019) Glycobiology 30(2): 72–73).

 GLYCAM(Robert J. Woods, Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, University of Georgia, U.S.A.) - this site has tools which allow one to answer the following questions: 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?  And, to Search for glycans in the PDB.

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

 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. GLAD extends the capability of the microarray data to produce more 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 - is a web application which is capable of drawing glycan structures using a GUI and providing the linear nomenclature as an output or using it as an input in a dynamic manner. GlycoGlyph also allows users to save the structures as an SVG vector graphic, and allows users to export the structure as condensed GlycoCT. (Reference: Mehta YA & Cummings RD (2020) Bioinformatics, 36(11): 3613–3614).

 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 the most comprehensive view of freely available chemical data from a single online search. It is owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

 Chem-Space - uses Marvin JS from Chemaxon to draw chemical structures  Once done you can search in their database (1.8 billion chemicals) for a chemical with an exact match, it substructure, or any similar structure. 

UPDATED: August, 2025