Representation of Glycan Structures

1 lUPAC Nomenclature. The summary of lUPAC carbohydrate nomenclature (McNaught, 1997) is available at http //www.chem.qmw.ac.uk/iupac/. Some highlights for glycan nomenclature (Table 2.4) are given below  

Extended form versus short form In the extended form, the branch connection is explicitly depicted and a short notation is derived by omitting  

Eor example, the extend and short forms of sialyl-Le trisaccharide are 

Homopolysaccharide (homoglycan) a general term for a polysaccharide composed of a single type of monosaccharide residue is obtained by replacing the ending -ose by -an, such as (1— 4)-a-D-glucan. 

2 Symbol nomenclature. For symbolic representation of glycan linkage for the annotation of mass spectra, the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (http // www.functionalglycomics.org/static/consortium/) agrees that  

---

Sahoo SS, Thomas C, Sheth A, Henson C, York WS. GLYDE-an expressive XML standard for the representation of glycan structure. Carbohydr. Res. 2005 340 2802-2807. 

---