GLYCOBROWSER: A TOOL FOR CONTEXTUAL VISUALIZATION OF BIOL DATA & PATHWAYS

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. Primary support for the subproject and the subproject's principal investigator may have been provided by other sources, including other NIH sources. The Total Cost listed for the subproject likely represents the estimated amount of Center infrastructure utilized by the subproject, not direct funding provided by the NCRR grant to the subproject or subproject staff. Glycoscientists can only make efficient use of the formalized knowledge embedded in our ontologies if they are provided with flexible interfaces that allow them to visualize this knowledge in a format that makes intuitive sense. The ontology itself consists of nodes and edges, whose meanings may not be obvious to the glycoscientist. To be useful, this information must be presented in a more familiar format. We addressed this need by developing GlycoBrowser, a tool for the visualization of ontological information in the glycomics domain. GlycoBrowser leverages the capabilities of GlycoVault, along with several other technologies, including RDF (http://www.w3.org/RDF/), AJAX (http://developers.sun.com/ajax/), Javascript, BRAHMS, etc. to represent structural information in a way that is intuitive for glycobiologists and to link this information to experimental data (glycomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics analyses). GycoBrowser provides a graphical display of glycan biosynthetic pathways and associated experimental data. Glycans are rendered "on the fly" using the standard representation endorsed by the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG). GlycoBrowser include a powerful and flexible graphical interface, including methods for building glycan structures from canonical components that are represented in the GlycO ontology. For example, GlycoBrowser supports rendering of a larger segment of the metabolic pathway and relevant experimental data (such as the abundances of the various glycans and the transcript levels for various glycosyl transferase-encoding genes) are shown below the pathway.