Glycan reachability analysis: A bottleneck-aware framework for inferring tissue-specific glycan biosynthetic potential from transcriptomics.

Glycan reachability analysis reveals tissue-specific biosynthetic potential with quantitative scores, uncovering hidden differences beyond binary predictions across 54 human tissues.

• Why it matters: Understanding glycan biosynthesis is crucial for insights into tissue function and disease, but current methods lack the ability to quantify relative biosynthetic capacity, limiting biological interpretation.
• What they did: The study developed a computational framework that integrates gene expression Z-scores across pathway steps using logical and minimum aggregation, analyzing 17,382 RNA-seq samples from GTEx v8.
• The result: This approach identified tissue-specific differences, such as low median reachability in the pancreas despite high binary positivity, and provided a hypothesis-generating measure of transcriptomic potential, though not directly reflecting enzyme activity.