Introduction
The growth in glycobiological data from high throughtput technologies and the need to mine this data, has led to the increased efforts to catalogue protein glycosylation as well as glycan-binding events. This drives the expansion of glycoinformatics that is needed to corroborate and analyse those events that are often reported separately.
To address this need, Glyco@Expasy is a web portal hosting resources that, when combined, suggest a view of glycans as mediators of protein-protein interactions. The first step in building this picture, entails considering glycan structures as a focal point of chemistry, biochemistry and structural biology. This approach will be illustrated with questions and examples arising from the analysis of publicly available data.