Meeting report on the international symposium on microbial Glycoconjugates and the GlySpace alliance: from micro- to macroglycoscience (MiGGA symposium).

The International Symposium on Microbial Glycoconjugates and the GlySpace Alliance: from micro to macro glycoscience (MiGGA) was held online from March 1 to 2022 March 3 (URL: https://migga2022.glycosmos.org/). This symposium was organized to introduce the MicroGlycoDB project as well as the GlySpace Alliance (Aoki-Kinoshita et al., 2020). MicroGlycoDB is a database of microbial glycans and glycan pathways developed in collaboration with the University of Lille (France), the CCRC at the University of Georgia (USA), and others. The prototype for this database is available at https://microglycodb.test.glycosmos.org.The GlySpace Alliance is an alliance of glycan data portals GlyCosmos (Yamada et al., 2020), GlyGen (York et al., 2019), and Glycomics@Expasy (Mariethoz et al., 2018). Because of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the symposium was held entirely online using the Zoom and Discord systems. There were 130 participants who attended this symposium from around the globe, from Asia to Europe and the US. In order to accommodate the different time zones, 3-hour Zoom sessions were held at 9:00 AM and 9:00 PM Japan time across three days. Three sessions on Microbial glycoconjugate catabolism and synthesis, and two sessions introducing glycan-related databases were held. In the Microbial glycoconjugate sessions, talks from the collaborators of MicroGlycoDB described their latest research on various microbes including Candida, Bifidobacteria, Streptococcus, and Mycoobacteria as well as technologies to investigate the structure and function of glycans and enzymes involved. In the GlySpace Alliance sessions, the many databases and tools in GlyCosmos, GlyGen and Glycomics@Expasy were presented, followed by a user workshop, where users could talk with the developers directly to learn how to use these resources.