KEGG GLYCAN for Integrated Analysis of Pathways, Genes, and Structures

Abstract

While much knowledge about glycans has accumulated, most of the primary data for both experimental and bioinformatics analyses are information on glycan structures and glycan-related genes. Therefore, it is necessary to aggregate all these chemical and genomic information together in an effort to predict complex cellular processes and to understand organism behaviors at a higher level. Following this perspective, we have been developing KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) (Kanehisa et al. 2008) to include three basic glycan resources: (1) GLYCAN, a database of glycan structures; (2) the glycosyltransferase and the glycosidase reaction library; and (3) glycanrelated pathways (Hashimoto et al. 2006). KEGG also includes three useful tools: (4) the Composite Structure Map (CSM), a map illustrating all possible variations in glycan structures within organisms; (5) KegDraw, an intuitive drawing tool for chemical structures; and (6) KCaM, a glycan search and alignment tool (Aoki et al. 2004). All resources are available at KEGG (http://www.genome.jp/kegg/glycan/).