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Disaccharide structure code for the easy representation of constituent oligosaccharides from glycosaminoglycans

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Here we introduce a new shorthand nomenclature for designating the disaccharide subunit structure of all glycosaminoglycans as a way to compare compositions and describe linear sequences. Each disaccharide structural code (DSC) comprises four alphanumeric characters that reflect the actual substituents and isomeric characteristics of each component sugar. Larger structures can be represented easily by forming concatamers. The structural transparency of this new nomenclature eliminates the need for ambiguous acronyms or difficult numeric representations.

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Figure 1: The DSC allows designation of all disaccharides derived from any type of glycosaminoglycan chain generated by either enzymatic or nitrous acid depolymerization.

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Acknowledgements

This work was initiated in Robert Rosenberg's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed at Washington University School of Medicine and the University of California, San Diego. Supported by grants GM33063 (to J.D.E) and GM69968 (to L.Z.).

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Author notes

  1. Roger Lawrence and Hong Lu: Roger Lawrence and Hong Lu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Roger Lawrence and Jeffrey D. Esko are in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Glycobiology Research and Training Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA. jesko@ucsd.edu,

    Roger Lawrence & Jeffrey D Esko

  2. Hong Lu and Lijuan Zhang are in the Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110, USA. lzhang@labmed.wustl.edu,

    Hong Lu & Lijuan Zhang

  3. Robert D. Rosenberg is in the Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.,

    Robert D Rosenberg

Authors
  1. Roger Lawrence
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  2. Hong Lu
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  3. Robert D Rosenberg
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  4. Jeffrey D Esko
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  5. Lijuan Zhang
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Lawrence, R., Lu, H., Rosenberg, R. et al. Disaccharide structure code for the easy representation of constituent oligosaccharides from glycosaminoglycans. Nat Methods 5, 291–292 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth0408-291

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