Archives des Bacterial Polysaccharides : Integrated use of Databases and Computational Tools for their Structural Investigations

Introduction

Why are glycans so important ? Glycans, also known as carbohydrates, saccharides or sugars, cover all living cells from humans to

Figure 2. The cartoon represents the general cell wall structure of Gram-positive bacteria on the left and Gram-negative bacteria. The main glycoconjugates components are sketched.

Microbial Glycoconjugate Structures

Bacterial polysaccharides can be classified into intracellular or extracellular polymeric substances (Figure 2). On the one hand, there are the

Computational Tools for the Structural Elucidation

Determining the glycan structure, presents many challenges, mainly related to glycan’s complexity and diversity, together with the non-templated nature of

Carbohydrate Databases

First of all, the accumulation and processing of published carbohydrate-related information resulted in several databases, including glycan structures and properties,

Visualising and Building Glycans

Many different publicly accessible glycoinformatics tools allow the building and visualisation of glycans structures. A thorough description of these instruments

Table 1: Different analytical techniques, NMR and MS-based, used to obtain information for the structural determination of glycans

Bioinformatics & Determination of Glycan Structures

Above all, bioinformatics tools are useful for achieving the hard goal of elucidating complex glycans structure, making it easier to

Mass Spectrometry Tools

Mass Spectrometry is one of the main analytical techniques currently used in the structural analysis of glycans. In particular, MALDI

NMR Spectroscopy Tools

The combination of mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy represents a powerful tool for the full characterisation of glycans. NMR spectroscopy

Conformational Analyis of Complex Glycans

The elucidation of complex glycans conformation in solution is one of the main intriguing aspects of bacterial oligo- and polysaccharides’

Glycan 3D modeling & 3D Structures Displays

Glycam: Online web that provides tools for 3D modelling carbohydrate-containing structures. It includes libraries and prediction tools together with useful

Conclusions

In conclusion, all the bioinformatic tools described here are pivotal support to the interpretation of experimental data and represent a

References

1. Aspinall, G. O., The Polysaccharides. Vol. 2 Academic Press : Orlando ; London, 1983 2. Turnbull, J. E. ; Field, R. A.,

The Authors

Ferran Nieto Fabregat Ferran graduated in chemistry with a biological mention in 2018 at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), basing