Glycan Reader is improved to recognize most sugar types and chemical modifications in the Protein Data Bank

Glycans play a central role in many essential biological processes. Glycan Reader was originally developed to simplify the reading of Protein Data Bank (PDB) files containing glycans through the automatic detection and annotation of sugars and glycosidic linkages between sugar units and to proteins, all based on atomic coordinates and connectivity information. Carbohydrates can have various chemical modifications at different positions, making their chemical space much diverse. Unfortunately, current PDB files do not provide exact annotations for most carbohydrate derivatives and more than 50% of PDB glycan chains have at least one carbohydrate derivative that could not be correctly recognized by the original Glycan Reader.