Bioinformatics applications to aid high-throughput glycan profiling

High-throughput methods to identify and quantify glycans in a given sample are rare. We have optimised a robotic platform for analysing biopharmaceuticals at each stage of the manufacturing process. In addition, it can be applied to basic research. The plate format makes it convenient for large sample sets; it is relatively cheap, robust and quantitative. However, the large datasets churned out by this platform require significant time to interpret. Consequently, informatics tool are required to help with this annotation. This article briefly describes our robotic platform and concentrates on a set of software tools for the interpretation of quantitative glycoprofiling data.