Linear anionic polysaccharides represented in PapayaDB by selected sulfation patterns and oligosaccharide lengths.
Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are a class of linear, highly anionic, periodic polysaccharides. They consist of repeating disaccharide units typically containing an uronic acid (glucuronic acid, GlcA, or iduronic acid, IdoA) and an amino sugar (N-acetylglucosamine, GlcNAc, or N-acetylgalactosamine, GalNAc), heavily sulfated at varied positions. Due to their dense negative charge, GAGs participate in critical biological signaling, cellular proliferation, extracellular matrix assembly, coagulation, and inflammatory processes. PapayaDB catalogs computational structural models of their interactions with cysteine cathepsins across different GAG lengths and configurations.