Although ongoing technical advances are accelerating the pace and sophistication of data acquisition in glycoscience, the transformation of these data to glycobiology knowledge, insight, and understanding is slowed by the limited number of tools that facilitate their integration with biological knowledge. Thus, to fill in the critical gaps, there is a need for a broadly relevant and sustainable glycoinformatics resource that can provide tools and data to address specific glycoscience questions. GlyGen is an integrated, extendable and cross-disciplinary glycoinformatics resource that will facilitate knowledge discovery in basic and translational glycobiology by integrating multidisciplinary data and knowledge from diverse resources. It will address glycobiology questions that can currently be answered only by extensive literature-based research and manual collection of data from disparate resources. The aims of the GlyGen project includes integrating and exchange of up-to-date glycobiology-related information and data with partnering data sources such as EMBL-EBI, NCBI, UniProt, UniCarbKB, and others; creating an intuitive web portal to search and browse for glycoscience knowledge that will also include off-line data analysis, data exploration, and mining. Furthermore, the GlyGen project includes the development of essential new information resources, namely the Glycan Microarray Database that will provide key information about the interactions of glycans with other biomolecules and a Glycan Naming Ontology (GNOme) that facilitates interpretation of incomplete structural information in the context of biological functions. GlyGen\u27s comprehensive data integration framework and valuable user\u27s feedback will provide unprecedented support for complex queries spanning diverse data types relevant to glycobiology, extending its scope beyond the mapping of glycan data to genes and proteins. The resource would be publicly available and will facilitate the sharing and dissemination of glycobiology knowledge. It will provide new opportunities for a systems-level understanding of glycobiology in disease and development, even for scientists who do not specialize in glycobiology
