GLYCOBIOLOGY, GLYCOMICS and GLYCOSCIENCES

http://www.glycoarrays.org.uk/index.htm UK GLYCOARRAYS CONSORTIUM Funded by the RCUK Basic Technology Programme. The consortium brings together scientists from the universities of Dundee, Liverpool, Manchester , Oxford , East Anglia and Imperial College London. The project officially began in May 2004 with an award of £3.5M from the Research Councils UK Basic Technology programme.

Carbohydrates interact with proteins in many biological processes such as fertilization, virus infections and even tumor growth. Therefore, structural and functional aspects concerning the interplay of the glycome (the complete set of carbohydrate structures produced by a particular cell or tissue) and the proteome (set of proteins) are of great interest in biology and medicine.

The aim of the present project is to develop carbohydrate arrays (glycoarrays) as innovative tools to map out the carbohydrate and protein partners in these highly specific interactions of the glycome.

http://www.glycosciences.org.uk/ The Glycosciences Forum was established in the UK in May 2005 to promote Glycosciences. It provides information about all aspects of Glycosciences, encourages funding in this area, as well as organising meetings at various locations.

http://www.functionalglycomics.org/fg/ Welcome to the Functional Glycomics Gateway, a comprehensive and regularly updated resource for functional glycomics research. This gateway represents a unique collaboration between the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG) and Nature Publishing Group (NPG). It is designed to provide up-to-date information and resources for research aimed at elucidating the roles of glycan-protein interactions in cell surface biology.

http://www.eurocarbdb.org/about The EUROCarbDB design study aims to create the foundations for databases and bioinformatics tools in the realm of glycobiology and glycomics, and will establish mainly the technical framework for bottom to top initiative where all interested research groups can feed in their primary data. The new infrastructure will constitute the nucleus for the creation of a depository for carbohydrate related data similar to the extensively used data collections in the area of genomics and proteomics.

The EUROCarbDB study concentrates on the evaluation and development of the basic requirements for the proposed infrastructure. It consists of four thematic tasks that include feasibility studies as well as essential preparatory steps for the establishment of EUROCarbDB: