Mike Tiemeyer (analytical glycobiology subgroup) and Will York (bioinformatics subgroup) and are organizing a workshop to facilitate interaction of CFG PIs for advancement and integration of glycan analysis and informatics. We expect that this workshop will be held in around the weekend of April 18, 2009 at the NIH campus in Bethesda MD, but no final plans have been made yet.

Success of this workshop depends on your participation, and we would really appreciate your input in planning it.

Is April 18 a convenient time for this meeting? Is Bethesda a convenient venue at which to meet?

Can you identify any individuals whose participation is critical for the success of this workshop?

Are there any issues that you think are critical to include in the agenda?

Our preliminary plan is to use the workshop as a way to continue the progress we have made at the Warren Workshop last summer and at the Glycobiology conference in November. We thought we would begin the workshop with sessions that will bring participants up to date with the latest developments in glycan analysis. THis part will be of most interest to analytical glycobiologists. This would be followed by sessions to discuss (and hopefully come to some consensus) regarding a set of well defined criteria for representing the confidence with which a glycan structure has been identified. This would require the close collaboration of analytical glycobiologists and bioinformaticians. Such a system would provide very useful information that could be attached to published manuscripts to help the non-expert determine the level of confidence that he/she could place in the glycomics data contained in the manuscript. Finally, we thought we would have a session to start defining standards for storing and exchanging the actual data that serves as provenance for defining the confidence level for the structural identification.

This preliminary agenda is certainly not set in stone, and we would very much like your input so we can improve it to meet the needs of the PIs.

Please send your comments to Mike Tiemeyer or me or post your comments here.