Overview

Over the last decade the fields of glycobiology and glycochemistry in combination with in-silico applications have been augmented by a further field - glycomics. A major aim of glycomics research is to achieve a comprehensive identification and characterization of the repertoire of glycan structures present in an organism, cell or tissue at a defined time. In addition, glycans and glycoconjugates have been increasingly perceived by the proteomics and genomics communities as essential elements in physiological and pathological processes rather than as decorative elements of lipids and proteins.

Glycans are extremely complex and diverse in their structures and thus it has been necessary to develop a wide range of experimental techniques and instrumentation for their detection and analysis. With the advancement of techniques for the interactive and structural analysis of glycoconjugates their essential role in phenomena such as cell adherence, cell–cell interactions, molecular trafficking, biosynthetic quality control, signal transduction and host– pathogen recognition, became apparent. Much efforts have been spent into describing both the structure and binding of glycans and these investigations also resulted in the observation of patterns of glycosylation which change in dependence of the developmental status of the cells. This makes glycosylation patterns an important marker for the detection of diseases and cellular malfunction. However, exciting questions are still unanswered that include the way of “encoding” and control of these diverse patterns and structure-function relationships of the vast variety of glycan structures and patterns. First milestones have been reached towards deciphering the purpose of glycan structures by applying a combination of experimental and bioinformatics tools.

In addition, the continual improvement of analysis methods and computational techniques leads to glycan characterization and identification with increased depth, speed and efficiency but also generates ever increasing amounts of data of variable quality and completeness. In addition, the validation of glycan structure assignments is impeded by a common reporting procedure which does not allow for the comprehensive description of relevant experimental parameters, computational methods and underlying assumptions. This in turn makes the successful annotation of data from the literature as well as mining in databases an uncertain endeavor and furthermore hampers interpretation and reproduction of this data.

With the support of the community-driven initiative, MIRAGE (Minimum Information Required for a Glycomics Experiment) much effort has been spent into changing the reporting culture and providing software tools for processing, annotating, storing and mining of data. Even though this is a long way to go to gain the acceptance by the community much progress has been made in the establishment of a global infrastructure that integrates the disparate glycan data from diverse sources.

This symposium aims to bring together scientists that “produce” the data with those scientists that “use” the data and make it available to the community. In particular, speakers of the symposia will contribute to unravel the complexity of glycans and deliver insights into the diverse physiological and structural manifestations of sugars by covering aspects such as: carbohydrates in diagnosis and therapy, bridging the gap between analysis and storage of glycan data, structure–function relationships of carbohydrates, carbohydrate–protein interaction and glycoarrays and software tools for analysis and data mining.