The GlycomeAtlas tool for visualizing and querying glycome data.

The development of glycomics technologies in recent years has produced a sufficient amount of data to begin analyzing the glycan structures present in various organisms and tissues. In particular, glycan profiling using mass spectrometry (MS) and tandem MS has generated a large amount of data that are waiting to be analyzed. The Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG) has provided a web resource for obtaining such glycan profiling data easily. Although an interactive spectrum viewer is provided on the website as a Java applet, it is not necessarily easy to search for particular glycans or to find commonalities between different tissues in a single organism, for example. Therefore, to allow users to better take advantage of the valuable glycome data that can be obtained from mass spectra and other leading technologies, we have developed a tool called Glycome Atlas which is pre-loaded with the data from the CFG and is also able to visualize local glycan profiling data for human and mouse. We have developed a tool to allow users to visualize and perform queries of glycome data. This tool, called GlycomeAtlas, is pre-loaded with glycome data as provided by the CFG. Moreover, users can load their own local glycome data into this tool to visualize and perform queries on their own data. This tool is available at the following URL: http://www.rings.t.soka.ac.jp/GlycomeAtlas/GUI.html. kkiyoko@soka.ac.jp.