P03-25

Exchange System for Glycan Textual Notations Development to Integrate Various Glycan Databases and Improve Search Accuracy

Hiromitsu SHIMOYAMA *, Masaaki MATSUBARA, Issaku YAMADA

Glycoinfomatics, The Noguchi Institute
( * E-mail: shimoyama@noguchi.or.jp )

Various notation formats have been developed to describe glycan structures, and then, databases with different notation exist independently. It is time-consuming to change the notation according to the databases to deposit and search glycans. The purpose of our study is development of a program that automatically converts a glycan notation according to databases to reduce above tasks and enable us to access databases easily, accurately, and widely.
Each glycan notation has their own limitations, for example, IUPAC cannot to represent ambiguous linkage patterns. However, to access the database comprehensively and automatically, even such a structure should be kept internally. Therefore, Web3 Unique Representation of Carbohydrate Structures (WURCS), which can uniquely represent complex glycan structures, was chosen to design the internal objects. As WURCS is complicated, glycan structures are expected to be obtained in a simple way such as IUPAC and GlycoCT, and the program stores the input internally and converts it according to that of databases. For example, an information of queries with an ambiguous pattern obtained in GlycoCT format would be simplified for IUPAC databases but may be fully utilized for other databases. As the internal data object are repeatedly used for different interconversion, the object related code can be simplified. Then, such program would be easy to maintain.