Glycobiology entails the study of glycans, or carbohydrate sugar chains. Much research has been made in understanding individual glycogenes such as glycosyltransferases, and glycan structures using glycomics technologies. However, to get an overall understanding of the importance of glycosylation, current technologies are lacking, and systems biology approaches have recently been incorporated to gain better insight into glycosylation mechanisms and their applicability to biological function. Many databases organizing glycobiology data have been developed, and a variety of methods for mathematically modeling glycosylation pathways have shown to be effective. While it is known that glycans modulate signaling pathways, however, the future is wide open for systems glycobiology research.

糖生物学需要对聚糖或碳水化合物糖链进行研究。在使用糖组学技术了解单个糖基因（例如糖基转移酶）和聚糖结构方面，已经进行了许多研究。然而，为了全面了解糖基化的重要性，目前缺乏技术，并且系统生物学方法最近被纳入以更好地了解糖基化机制及其对生物学功能的适用性。已经开发了许多组织糖生物学数据的数据库，并且已经显示出多种数学上建模糖基化途径的方法是有效的。虽然已知聚糖可以调节信号通路，但是，系统糖生物学研究的未来是广阔的。