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bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.08.18.745318

GlycoMeSH: linking glycan structures to biomedical context for systematic enrichment analysis

Kitani, A.·Zhang, B.·Himori, K.·Matsui, Y.
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Abstract

Glycan identification has advanced, but glycan structures remain difficult to translate into reproducible biomedical context because reusable glycan-level annotations are sparse. We present GlycoMeSH, a resource that links glycans to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) through an inference model, a traceable association database and a glycan-set enrichment workflow. GlycoMeSH-BERT recovered ~60% of literature-derived associations at recall@30 and expanded open-vocabulary MeSH coverage beyond closed-label baselines, without higher per-prediction accuracy. At matched candidate counts, its predictions showed motif-level semantic agreement comparable to those baselines, independently of the training labels. GlycoMeSH-DB contains 789,627 associations between 26,954 glycans and 20,302 MeSH terms. GlycoMeSH-EA returned enriched MeSH terms for glycan sets from glycomics and glycoproteomics datasets. Each association represents a biomedical context rather than a validated mechanism, and retains its source PMID or prediction score for audit. GlycoMeSH supplies the missing, evidence-traceable annotation layer that makes glycan sets directly analyzable by enrichment across glycoscience datasets.

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Kitani, A., Zhang, B., Himori, K., Matsui, Y.. 2026-08-20. GlycoMeSH: linking glycan structures to biomedical context for systematic enrichment analysis. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.18.745318

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