SWEET - WWW-based rapid 3D construction of oligo- and polysaccharides.

SWEET is a WWW-based tool which rapidly converts the commonly used carbohydrate sequence information directly into a preliminary but reliable 3D model which can be visualised and written to files in several ways. SWEET is accessible via the Internet at http://www.dkfz-heidelberg.de/spec/. a. bohne@dkfz-heidelberg.de or w.vonderlieth@ dkfz-heidelberg.de The current version of SWEET generates only one conformation out of a manifold. Several authors have analysed possible conformations of high-mannose N-linked glycans using a combination of NMR methods and computational approaches showing that such molecules are rather flexible populating normally several conformations for each glycosidic linkage. The displayed model exhibits for all glycosidic linkages a conformation which is in accordance with the reported variations of Phi, psi and omega values for specific linkage (see http://www.dkfz-heidelberg. de/spec/sweet2/doc/input/sba_example.html).