O-Glycologue: A Formal-Language-Based Generator of O-Glycosylation Networks

Methods Mol Biol. 2022:2370:223-236. doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-1685-7_11.

Abstract

The web application O-Glycologue provides an online simulation of the biosynthetic enzymes of O-linked glycosylation, using a knowledge-based system described previously. Glycans can be imported in GlycoCT condensed format, or else as IUPAC condensed names, and passed as substrates to the enzymes, which are modeled as regular-expression-based substitutions on strings. The resulting networks of reactions can be exported as SBML. The effects of knocking out different sets of enzyme activities can be compared. A method is provided for predicting the enzymes required to produce a given substrate, using an O-glycan from human gastric mucin as an example. The system has been adapted to other systems of glycosylation enzymes, and an application to ganglioside oligosaccharide synthesis is demonstrated. O-Glycologue is available at https://glycologue.org/o/ .

Keywords: Computational modeling; Gangliosides; Glycosyltransferases; Human milk oligosaccharides; O-linked glycosylation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Glycosylation*
  • Humans
  • Language
  • Oligosaccharides
  • Polysaccharides
  • Software

Substances

  • Oligosaccharides
  • Polysaccharides