Deciphering functional glycosaminoglycan motifs in development
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Updated: Feb 12, 2026

Peptide-based Identification of Functional Motifs and their Binding Partners
Published on: June 30, 2013
Robert A Townley1, Hannes E Bülow2
1Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, United States.
Abstract:
Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) such as heparan sulfate, chondroitin/dermatan sulfate, and keratan sulfate are linear glycans, which when attached to protein backbones form proteoglycans. GAGs are essential components of the extracellular space in metazoans. Extensive modifications of the glycans such as sulfation, deacetylation and epimerization create structural GAG motifs. These motifs regulate protein-protein interactions and are thereby repsonsible for many of the essential functions of GAGs. This review focusses on recent genetic approaches to characterize GAG motifs and their function in defined signaling pathways during development. We discuss a coding approach for GAGs that would enable computational analyses of GAG sequences such as alignments and the computation of position weight matrices to describe GAG motifs.
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