Glycome

The glycome is the entire complement of sugars, whether free or present in more complex molecules, of an organism. An alternative definition is the entirety of carbohydrates in a cell. The glycome may in fact be one of the most complex entities in nature. The glycome is studied by glycobiology sometimes referred to as glycomics.

The glycome exceeds the complexity of the proteome as a result of the even greater diversity of the glycome's constituent carbohydrates and is further complicated by the sheer multiplicity of possibilities in the combination and interaction of the carbohydrates with each other and with proteins.

Ajit Varki, professor of medicine and cellular and molecular biology, and director of the Glycobiology Research and Training Center at the University of California, San Diego claims that the glycome is "probably thousands of times as complicated as the genome, in magnitude of complexity and level of diversity". (Perkel 2002)

External links and references

 * Bio-IT World a periodical covering glycomics
 * Glycome project: concept, strategy and preliminary application to Caenorhabditis elegans (A proposal to base the glycome project on Caenorhabditis elegans, a microscopic worm, whose entire genome is already sequenced)
 * 'GlycoChip'