Mining frequent subtrees in glycan data using the RINGS glycan miner tool.

This chapter describes the Glycan Miner Tool, which is available as a part of the Resource for INformatics of Glycomes at Soka Web site. It implements the α-closed frequent subtree algorithm to find significant subtrees from within a data set of glycan structures, or carbohydrate sugar chains. The results are returned in order of p-value, which is computed based on the probability of the reproducibility of the returned structures. There is also a user-friendly manual that allows users to apply glycan array data from the Consortium for Functional Glycomics. Thus, glycobiologists can take the glycan structures that bind to a particular glycan-binding protein, for example, to retrieve the glycan subtrees that are deemed to be important for the binding to occur.