Trends and future perspectives for glycoinformatics

Analytical approaches in glycoinformatics can be divided into two categories: methods focusing on glycans whose base units are monosaccharides, and methods focusing on glycans at the atomic level. The former method includes glycan structure data mining, profiling analysis and recently Fingerprints, which is an application of cheminformatics techniques to glycans represented at the monosaccharide level. On the other hand, docking analysis for understanding the interactions between glycans and proteins require methods of the latter category. It has been shown that novel analytical techniques and new knowledge can be obtained by combining these independent methods focusing on glycans at the monosaccharide and atomic levels. In this manuscript, we describe the current trends in glycoinfomatics focusing on methods both at the monosaccharide and atomic levels, as well as provide perspectives for the future.