Functional implications of glycans and their curation: insights from the workshop held at the 16th Annual International Biocuration Conference in Padua, Italy.

Dynamic changes in protein glycosylation impact human health and disease progression. However, current resources that capture disease and phenotype information focus primarily on the macromolecules within the central dogma of molecular biology (DNA, RNA, proteins). To gain a better understanding of organisms, there is a need to capture the functional impact of glycans and glycosylation on biological processes.

The Glycan Structure Dictionary-a dictionary describing commonly used glycan structure terms.

Recent technological advances in glycobiology have resulted in a large influx of data and the publication of many papers describing discoveries in glycoscience. However, the terms used in describing glycan structural features are not standardized, making it difficult to harmonize data across biomolecular databases, hampering the harvesting of information across studies and hindering text mining and curation efforts. To address this shortcoming, the Glycan Structure Dictionary has been developed as a reference dictionary to provide a standardized list of widely used glycan terms that can help in the curation and mapping of glycan structures described in publications.

Enhancing the interoperability of glycan data flow between ChEBI, PubChem and GlyGen.

Glycans play a vital role in health, disease, bioenergy, biomaterials and bio-therapeutics. As a result, there is keen interest to identify and increase glycan data in bioinformatics databases like ChEBI and PubChem, and connecting them to resources at the EMBL-EBI and NCBI to facilitate access to important annotations at a global level. GlyTouCan is a comprehensive archival database that contains glycans obtained primarily through batch upload from glycan repositories, glycoprotein databases and individual laboratories.

The human O-GlcNAcome database and meta-analysis.

Over the past 35 years, ~1700 articles have characterized protein O-GlcNAcylation. Found in almost all living organisms, this post-translational modification of serine and threonine residues is highly conserved and key to biological processes. With half of the primary research articles using human models, the O-GlcNAcome recently reached a milestone of 5000 human proteins identified.

GlyGen data model and processing workflow.

Summary: Glycoinformatics plays a major role in glycobiology research, and the development of a comprehensive glycoinformatics knowledgebase is critical. This application note describes the GlyGen data model, processing workflow and the data access interfaces featuring programmatic use case example queries based on specific biological questions. The GlyGen project is a data integration, harmonization and dissemination project for carbohydrate and glycoconjugate-related data retrieved from multiple international data sources including UniProtKB, GlyTouCan, UniCarbKB and other key resources.

Enabling precision medicine via standard communication of HTS provenance, analysis, and results.

A personalized approach based on a patient's or pathogen's unique genomic sequence is the foundation of precision medicine. Genomic findings must be robust and reproducible, and experimental data capture should adhere to findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) guiding principles. Moreover, effective precision medicine requires standardized reporting that extends beyond wet-lab procedures to computational methods.

Antibacterial Activities of Bacteriagenic Silver Nanoparticles Against Nosocomial .

Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as one of the major nosocomial pathogens implicated in variety of severe infections and mortality. It is rapidly developing multi-drug resistance and also possesses surface colonization ability, which make it most difficult to treat through traditional antibiotics. This is an extensive study to describe the antibacterial activity of bacteriagenic silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) against A.