Yukie Taylor 

Glycoinformatics, Life Sciences, Biomolecular Chemistry

Analysis of glycan-protein interactions using glycoinformatics

Glycans are molecules consisting of chains of monosaccharides and are involved in a variety of recognition systems not only in healthy conditions but also in infectious and non-infectious diseases, such as inflammation, signal transduction, and immune regulation. Therefore, elucidating the glycan recognition mechanism is an extremely important issue.
Currently, many experimental methods have been published for investigating glycan-protein interactions, such as glycan microarrays and lectin arrays. Data analyzed using various array platforms are published in papers and are also made public in repositories.
In this study, we are using array data and metadata to analyze which sites on glycans serve as motifs for binding to glycan-binding samples such as proteins. Furthermore, by performing text mining and data curation, we aim to gain insight into glycans and glycan-mediated molecular interactions in a broader biological context.

August 2016: Completed doctoral course in bioinformatics at the Graduate School of Engineering, Soka University
October 2016: Postdoctoral Fellow, Imperial College London (UK)
November 2017, Macquarie University (Australia) PhD. Programme
in Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences, Completed
September 2023: Specially Lecturer at the Soka University Glycan & Life System Integration Center

Japanese Society for Bioinformatics, Japanese Biochemical Society, Society for Glycobiology, International Society for Bioturbation

(Original paper)
Akune, Y., Arpinar, S., Silva, LM, Palma, AS, Tajadura-Ortega, V., Aoki-Kinoshita, KF, ... & Feizi, T. (2022). CarbArrayART: a new software tool for carbohydrate microarray data storage, processing, presentation, and reporting. Glycobiology, 32(7), 552-555.

Bonnardel, F., Haslam, SM, Dell, A., Feizi, T., Liu, Y., Tajadura-Ortega, V., ... & Imberty, A. (2021). Proteome-wide prediction of bacterial carbohydrate-binding proteins as a tool for understanding commensal and pathogen colonization of the vaginal microbiome. npj Biofilms and Microbiomes, 7(1), 49.

Hosoda, M., Akune, Y., & Aoki-Kinoshita, KF (2017). Development and application of an algorithm to compute weighted multiple glycan alignments. Bioinformatics, 33(9), 1317-1323.

Akune, Y., Lin, CH, Abrahams, JL, Zhang, J., Packer, NH, Aoki-Kinoshita, KF, & Campbell, MP (2016). Comprehensive analysis of the N-glycan biosynthetic pathway using bioinformatics to generate UniCorn: A theoretical N-glycan structure database. Carbohydrate Research, 431, 56-63.

Campbell, MP, Ranzinger, R., Lütteke, T., Mariethoz, J., Hayes, CA, Zhang, J., ... & Lisacek, F. (2014). Toolboxes for a standardized and systematic study of glycans. BMC bioinformatics, 15, 1-11.

Campbell, MP, Peterson, R., Mariethoz, J., Gasteiger, E., Akune, Y., Aoki-Kinoshita, KF, ... & Packer, NH (2014). UniCarbKB: building a knowledge platform for glycoproteomics. Nucleic acids research, 42(D1), D215-D221.

Akune, Y., Hosoda, M., Kaiya, S., Shinmachi, D., & Aoki-Kinoshita, KF (2010). The RINGS resource for glycome informatics analysis and data mining on the Web. Omics: a journal of integrative biology, 14(4), 475-486.