Abstract
Glycoinformatics is a critical resource for the study of glycobiology, and glycobiology is a necessary component for understanding the complex interface between intra- and extracellular spaces. Despite this, there is limited software available to scientists studying these topics, requiring each to create fundamental data structures and representations anew for each of their applications. This leads to poor uptake of standardization and loss of focus on the real problems. We present glypy, a library written in Python for reading, writing, manipulating, and transforming glycans at several levels of precision. In addition to understanding several common formats for textual representation of glycans, the library also provides application programming interfaces (APIs) for major community databases, including GlyTouCan and UnicarbKB. The library is freely available under the Apache 2 common license with source code available at https://github.com/mobiusklein/ and documentation at https://glypy.readthedocs.io/ .