Glycomics is an emerging field within the „-omics-sciences“ which addresses the investigation of the structure-function relationships of complex biosynthesized carbohydrates and the role they play within biological systems.

The post-genomic era has seen an explosion of activities in the areas of genomics and proteomics in both fundamental research as well as biotechnology applications. Sequencing and synthesis of nucleic acids and proteins has been performed in an automated fashion for many years now; these important basic techniques are now being applied to carbohydrates. Through the work of a number of key laboratories around the world, significant scientific and technical advances are being made resulting in an increasing number of data sets of important interactions of carbohydrates with proteins and nucleic acids become available.

The scientific progress of both genomics and proteomics relies on the interdisciplinary nature of a laboratory-based and a computer-based cooperation. Such an interdisciplinary “glyco”-based community is currently starting to become established; this symposium is aimed at supporting these efforts by bringing together glycochemists and biologists with experts in bioinformatics and computer sciences to lay the ground-work for a concerted effort in the area of glyco-bioinformatics.

The symposium will cover the use of publicly available data, data mining, structure prediction and docking of carbohydrates, web-based services to combine proteomics and glycomics data for structure-function research and glycosylation analysis.

The meeting will provide an unique opportunity to pave the way such that in the next few years glyco-bioinformatics can be integrated in a universal platform that will serve biologists, chemists and all interested in glycosciences.

Decoding the Glycome
James C. Paulson, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA

Glycoinformatics for Structural Glycomics
Stuart Haslam, Imperial College London, UK

Mining Significant Patterns from Glycan Structures
Hiroshi Mamitsuka, Kyoto University, Japan

Bioinformatics - Key to the Future of Glycomics
Peter H. Seeberger, Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

"Glycosylation Reactions" - from Biocatalysis to Medical Applications
Sabine Flitsch, The University of Manchester, UK

Glycosyltransferases in Motion - Insights from NMR
Thomas Peters, University of Lübeck, Germany

Tandem Mass Spectrometry Approaches for Structural Determinations of N- and O-linked Glycans
Catherine E. Costello, Boston University, USA

Automated N-Glycan Composition Analysis with LC MS/MSMS
Hannu Peltoniemi, Applied Numerics Oy, Helsinki, Finland

A Robotic HPLC-based Platform for High-throughput Glycan Analysis with Bioinformatics Platform for Data Interpretation: Integration Glycomcis with other -omics Technologies
Pauline M. Rudd, NIBRT, Dublin, Ireland

Data Mining is only as Good as the Information Available: Is our Data Good Enough?
Nicolle Packer, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Glyco-Bioinformatics - A Data Mining Perspective
Stefan Kramer, Technical University Munich, Germany

Evaluation of RDF Databases - Storing and Querying a Glycomics Ontology
Harald Kosch, University of Passau, Germany

Development of a User-friendly Interface for Molecular Modelling
Pamela Greenwell & Hans Heindl, University of Westminster, London, UK

The Carbohydrate-active Enzymes Database: A Specialist Resource for the Glycoscience Community
Bernhard Henrissat, Universités Aix-Marseille II, Marseille, France

Data Integration in Glycomics
Rahul Raman, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

Glycooptimization of Antibody and Protein-based Biopharmaceuticals
Steffen Goletz, Glycotope GmbH, Berlin, Germany

Sweet Nightmares - Carbohydrate-protein Docking
Oliver Kohlbacher, University of Tübingen, Germany

Software Tools for Storing, Processing and Displaying Carbohydrate Microarray Data
Mark Stoll, Imperial College London, UK

Highlights of the Neoglycolipid (NGL)-based Microarray - a Technology Geared to Deciphering the Glycome
Ten Feizi, Imperial College London, UK

Building Blocks for Automated Elucidation of Metabolites
Christoph Steinbeck, EBI, Cambridge, UK

Conformational Analysis of Complex Oligosaccharides and Glycoproteins
Martin Frank, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany

Leveraging Glycan Array Data with Computational Carbohydrate Threading to Define 3D Glycan Binding Epitopes
Robert J. Woods, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA