Bioinformatics approaches in glycomics and drug discovery

Within the field of bioinformatics, interest in glycan structures has increased steadily since the start of the 21st century, with several databases worldwide accumulating data. The most notable publicly available databases are KEGG GLYCAN in Japan, glycoSCIENCES.de in Germany and that of the Consortium for Functional Glycomics in the US. With this increasing abundance of data, there are greater possibilities for applying tree-based models and algorithms to glycan structure data. Research in this area of glycome informatics is reviewed. The combination of these datasets and informatics techniques to enable extraction of the most important (and perhaps the most interesting) information--the links between glycans and diseases, and the identification of biomarkers and drug targets--is discussed.