糖类的生物信息学资源

Bioinformatics on Carbohydrates

生物信息学在推动遗传学和蛋白质科学的研究领域中,已发挥了举足轻重的作用.相比较而言,糖科学产生的信息还比较有限,随着人们对糖类分子的关注,糖生物学的发展也出现新的契机,其信息正在飞速地增长.对已经获得的糖类相关知识进行系统整合就显得越来越有必要,许多研究型数据库和免费工具已应运而生,并且数目在不断扩大,正成为科学工作者非常便利的工具.但到目前为止,许多数据库或者网络预测工具在文献中很少提及或难以找到,给研究者带来了不少的麻烦.部分原因是数据库资源本身数据不断在更新,人机界面也变得越方便和人性化,另外就是人们对于这些新型的研究工具了解较少.这篇综述介绍了目前网络上最常用的糖类生物信息学资源,包括糖的一级结构,分析测试数据、构象,酶,凝集素,糖蛋白等方面的各种数据库.

Bioinformatics has a pivotal role in advancing genetics and protein sciences. The large amount of information generated by genomics, and now proteomics, has been a driving force. By comparison, glycosciences had generated relatively small amount of data. With more attention paid to the molecules of carbohydrate, there appears new chance for the development of glycobiology, of which the information is increasing intensively. The need to organize our knowledge about carbohydrates is, however, growing constantly and has given rise to an increasing number of public databases and freely available tools. This review gives an overview of the carbohydrate-oriented resources currently available on the Internet, containing information on primary structures and analytic data of carbohydrates, conformation of carbohydrates, enzymes, lectins, glycoproteins. Many of them are seldom referred to the literature or difficult to find, partly because of the constant flux of the net data and the human computer interface development of the databases, but also because these resources are seldom known in the scientific communities.