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The GlyCosmos Portal: a unified and comprehensive web resource for the glycosciences

Nature Methods volume 17, pages 649–650 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — We present the GlyCosmos Glycoscience Portal (https://glycosmos.org), an integrated web resource for accessing glycoscience data derived from a variety of disparate web resources.

The field of glycoscience deals with the study of carbohydrate structures and their functions in biology, energy, agriculture and medicine1. These structures, often called glycans, are attached to proteins and lipids, and modulate their functions in various biological processes, including metabolism, signaling and diseases. Alterations in glycans and glycoconjugates can convey disease-diagnostic information; these molecules are thus of increasing importance as drug targets and in biopharmaceutical drug development. In agriculture and energy, carbohydrates such as cellulose are the focus of novel biofuels.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of the data in GlyCosmos.

References

  1. Campbell, M. P., Aoki-Kinoshita, K. F., Lisacek, F., York, W. S. & Packer, N. H. Glycoinformatics. In Essentials of Glycobiology 3rd edn (eds. Varki, A. et al.) Ch. 52 (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2017); https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK453097/

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge Haruko Kitakaze for her support of this project. The authors acknowledge Yoshinori Suzuki for his contributions to this work and would like to dedicate this manuscript to him. This work has been supported by the Integration Promotion Program of the Japan Science and Technology Agency and the National Bioscience Database Center (NBDC). This work has also been partly supported by NIH Common Fund grant number U01-GM125267-01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Noguchi Institute, Tokyo, Japan

    Issaku Yamada & Shinichiro Tsuchiya

  2. Soka University, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Tokyo, Japan

    Masaaki Shiota, Tamiko Ono, Masae Hosoda, Akihiro Fujita & Kiyoko F. Aoki-Kinoshita

  3. SparqLite LLC, Tokyo, Japan

    Daisuke Shinmachi & Nobuyuki P. Aoki

  4. Niigata University Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences, Niigata, Japan

    Yu Watanabe & Shujiro Okuda

  5. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Japan

    Noriaki Fujita, Kiyohiko Angata, Hiroyuki Kaji & Hisashi Narimatsu

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  1. Issaku Yamada
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  2. Masaaki Shiota
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  15. Kiyoko F. Aoki-Kinoshita
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Contributions

M.S., D.S., T.O., S.T., M.H., A.F., N.P.A., Y.W. and N.F. all worked on various aspects of GlyCosmos and related database development. K.A. and H.N. provided biological knowledge and are responsible for the data from the ACGG-DB; I.Y. provided chemical knowledge and is responsible for the data from GlycoNAVI, and K.F.A. oversaw the entire project while assisting with development. All authors contributed to writing the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kiyoko F. Aoki-Kinoshita.

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Competing interests

N.P.A. and D.S. are employees of SparqLite, Ltd.

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Editorial note: This article has been peer reviewed.

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Yamada, I., Shiota, M., Shinmachi, D. et al. The GlyCosmos Portal: a unified and comprehensive web resource for the glycosciences. Nat Methods 17, 649–650 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-020-0879-8

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