In the so called post-genomics era, in addition to proteomics, complex carbohydrates [or glycans] are emerging as an important class of biological molecules involved in fundamental biological processes. Glycans are mainly present on cell surfaces and in the extracellular milieu where they interact with numerous glycan binding proteins [GBPs] that are secreted as biochemical signals or directly present in the surface of the same cell or a different cell thus playing a vital role in cell-cell communication thereby regulating tissue/organ functions. Recognizing the importance of addressing the challenges in functional glycomics to provide a new dimension to biology and medicine, the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences funded the Consortium for Functional Glycomics [www.functionalglycomics.org] in 2001. The Consortium is a large scale research initiative involving the leading researchers in the field of glycobiology and its overreaching goal is to define paradigms by which protein-carbohydrate interactions mediate cell-cell communication. In the past couple of years the Consortium has been quite successful in generating vast amounts of new glycomics related data.
The specific aim during Phase I of the grant is to build a prototype software tool for identifying patterns related to the specificity of glycan-Glycan binding Protein [GBP] interactions. The software tool will be developed on a data mining platform that will attempt to identify rules that govern the selectivity of GBPs. This software tool would be valuable to both the Consortium as well as glycobiology community by providing a framework for rapidly expanding the current knowledge on the physiologically relevant ligand specificities of GBPs. The future goals will include building and integrating additional software tools into a glycomics workbench, which will be useful to glycobiology researchers and commercial organizations.
