Syntactic Sugars: Crafting a Regular Expression Framework for Glycan Structures

Abstract Summary Structural analysis of glycans pose significant challenges in glycobiology due to their complex sequences. Research questions such as analyzing the sequence content of the α1-6 branch in N- glycans, are biologically meaningful yet can be hard to automate. Here, we introduce a regular expression system, designed for glycans, feature-complete, and closely aligned with regular expression formatting. We use this to annotate glycan motifs of arbitrary complexity, perform differential expression analysis on designated sequence stretches, or elucidate branch-specific binding specificities of lectins in an automated manner. We are confident that glycan regular expressions will empower computational analyses of these sequences. Availability and implementation Our regular expression framework for glycans is implemented in Python and is incorporated into the open-source glycowork package (version 1.1+). Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/BojarLab/glycowork/blob/master/glycowork/motif/regex.py. Contact daniel.bojar{at}gu.se Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.