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. “Glycomics, analogous to genomics and proteomics, is the systematic study of all glycan structures of a given cell type or organism” and is a subset of glycobiology. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “Move over, DNA. Life’s other code is more subtle and far more powerful,” Hayley Bennett, NewScientist (29 March 2019, paywall):
The genetic code has just four biochemical letters strung together in lines. But the sugar code, known as the glycome, contains tens of different sugars that fit together in branched strings called glycans (see Diagram). Reading the sugar code isn’t just a case of decoding it letter by letter, but recognising the shape of each sugar and understanding what it means. That is hard. “It was so much easier to build on the DNA code, to develop tools for genomics,” says Godula.
