Abstract

Glycosyltransferases (GTs) play a central role in sustaining all forms of life through the biosynthesis of complex carbohydrates. Despite significant strides made in recent years to establish computational resources, databases and tools to understand the nature and role of carbohydrates and related glycoenzymes, a data analytics framework that connects the sequence-structure–function relationships to the evolution of GTs is currently lacking. This hinders the characterization of understudied GTs and the synthetic design of GTs for medical and biotechnology applications. Here, we present GTXplorer as an integrated platform that presents evolutionary information of GTs adopting a GT-A fold in an intuitive format enabling in silico investigation through comparative sequence analysis to derive informed hypotheses about their function. The tree view mode provides an overview of the evolutionary relationships of GT-A families and allows users to select phylogenetically relevant families for comparisons. The selected families can then be compared in the alignment view at the residue level using annotated weblogo stacks of the GT-A core specific to the selected clade, family, or subfamily. All data are easily accessible and can be downloaded for further analysis. GTXplorer can be accessed at https://vulcan.cs.uga.edu/gtxplorer/ or from GitHub at https://github.com/esbgkannan/GTxplorer to deploy locally. By packaging multiple data streams into an accessible, user-friendly format, GTXplorer presents the first evolutionary data analytics platform for comparative glycomics.

中文翻译：

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GTXplorer：导航和可视化折叠 A 糖基转移酶中编码的进化信息的门户

摘要

糖基转移酶 (GT) 通过复杂碳水化合物的生物合成在维持所有生命形式中发挥着核心作用。尽管近年来在建立计算资源、数据库和工具以了解碳水化合物和相关糖酶的性质和作用方面取得了重大进展，但目前仍缺乏将序列-结构-功能关系与 GT 进化联系起来的数据分析框架。这阻碍了未充分研究的 GT 的表征以及用于医疗和生物技术应用的 GT 的合成设计。在这里，我们将 GTXplorer 作为一个集成平台，以直观的格式呈现采用 GT-A 折叠的 GT 的进化信息，从而能够通过比较序列分析进行计算机研究，以得出有关其功能的知情假设。树视图模式提供了 GT-A 家族进化关系的概览，并允许用户选择系统发育相关的家族进行比较。然后可以使用特定于所选进化枝、家族或亚家族的 GT-A 核心的注释 weblogo 堆栈在残基水平的比对视图中比较所选家族。所有数据都易于访问，可以下载以进行进一步分析。GTXplorer 可以在 https://vulcan.cs.uga.edu/gtxplorer/ 或从 GitHub 访问 https://github.com/esbgkannan/GTxplorer 以在本地部署。通过将多个数据流打包成可访问、用户友好的格式，GTXplorer 提供了第一个用于比较糖组学的进化数据分析平台。