The focus of this project was the development, improvement and testing of tools used for carbohydrate research. Research into the structural properties of carbohydrates is vital for the development of vaccines and in drug design because of their dense distribution on different pathogens. Such research relies on the use of software tools in order to visualise and understand the 2D and 3D structure of molecules.
One of the aspects of this project was the testing, documenting and refactoring of Glcyarbo. Glycarbo is a UCT-built tool used for building 2D and 3D carbohydrate molecules and faced issues relating to usability, functionality and maintainability. It comprises of Glycano (2D sketcher) and CarbBuilderWeb (3D builder). This project focused primarily on issues related to Glycano.
The other aspect of this project was the iterative design and development of Glycan3DB. A database dashboard of microbial carbohydrate information and structures was developed from scratch. The dataset that it was built upon was that of Klebisella Pneumonia, however it is extensible to potentially any microbial carbohydrate. An iterative strategy was used to plan, prototype, build and eventually user test Glycan3DB. This project covers all aspects of this.
The problem of Glycano’s maintainability and usability is the main aim of this aspect of the project. This includes making functional and non-functional changes to Glycano's codebase to improve its chemical accuracy and usability, adding documentation to improve its maintainability, as well as performing user-testing.
The main aims of Glycan 3DB were to build an extensible, usable and accurate database dashboard from scratch. One which has all the data needed for full understanding of any given antigen, and one which is easily maintainable and applicable to potentially any pathogen.