P212121

Carbohydrates (glycans) are a major class of biological macromolecules along with proteins and DNA molecules. The array of possible combination of carbohydrates is astounding. Here is an extensive list of carbohydrate databases that offer a number of different searching methods as well as entries, enjoy.

1) GlycomeDB is a carbohydrate structure metadatabase that has combined all free databases (CFG, KEGG (right panel), GLYCOSCIENCES.de (no $), BCSDB, GlycoBase (Dublin, Lille) and Carbbank) including both their structures and annotations.

2) Glycoconjugate Data Bank has a really cool search GUI (see ‘Search glycan structures’)

3) O-GlycBase contains 242 glycoprotein entries of both O- and C-glycosylated proteins.

4) Glycan Binding Proteins seems heavily dependent on knowing the CFG ID of your glycan of interest.

5) GLYCO3D breaks down glycans into seperate databases such as monosaccharides, di, oligo, poly, lectins, glycosyltranserases and Gag binding proteins. The search is organized by a series of drop down menus, which is really helpful if you are taking a top down approach (animal to glycan). On the downside, the website has not been updated since May of 2007.

6) Lectins contains lectins from plant, algae, virus, animal, bacteria, yeast and fungus.

7) Carbohydrate-Active enZYmes Database describes the families of structurally-related catalytic and carbohydrate-binding modules (or functional domains) of enzymes that degrade, modify, or create glycosidic bonds.

Glyco Enzymes is good if you have a monosaccharide and want to find out the glyco-enzymes involved. This database is not for finding structural information such as what is found in the PDB.

9) Bacterial Polysaccharide Gene Database doesn’t seem to be working anymore