GNOme, an ontology for glycan naming and subsumption

Anal Bioanal Chem. 2025 Feb 8. doi: 10.1007/s00216-025-05757-8. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

While GlyTouCan provides stable identifiers for referencing glycan structures, they are not organized semantically. GNOme, a glycan naming and subsumption ontology and a member of the OBOFoundry, organizes GlyTouCan accessions for automated reasoning and interactive browsing of glycan structures by subsumption. GNOme makes it quick and easy to discover glycans with a specific degree of characterization; provides a text-based table of common synonyms for specific structures and compositions; enumerates glycan subsumption relationships for automated reasoning; and assigns each glycan to well-defined categories based on their degree of characterization. As an OBOFoundry ontology, GNOme can be readily integrated with other OBOFoundry ontologies and standards initiatives that need to refer to glycans with various degrees of characterization. GNOme is integrated with GlyGen, a glycoinformatics knowledge base, providing navigation to "related glycans," and expanding the utility of species and glycan classification annotations. GNOme is available at https://gnome.glyomics.org/ and via GlyGen, the OBO Foundry, and GitHub.

Keywords: Glycans; Ontology; Subsumption.