glypy: An OpenSource Glycoinformatics Library

Glycoinformatics is a critical resource for the study of glycobiology, and glycobiology is a necessary component for understanding the complex interface between intra- and extra-cellular 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 standardized formats for textual representation of glycans, the library also provides APIs for major community database, including GlyTouCan and UnicarbKB. The library is freely available under the Apache 2 common license, with source code available at https://github.com/mobiusklein/glypy and documentation at https://glypy.readthedocs.io