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The Publisher regrets that this article is an accidental duplication of an article that has already been published, doi: 10.1016/j.carres.2010.01.003. The duplicate article has therefore been withdrawn.

Knowledge of the 3D structure of glycans is a prerequisite for a complete understanding of the biological processes glycoproteins are involved in. However, due to a lack of standardised nomenclature, carbohydrate compounds are difficult to locate within the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Using an algorithm that detects carbohydrate structures only requiring element types and atom coordinates, we were able to detect 1663 entries containing a total of 5647 carbohydrate chains. The majority of chains are found to be N-glycosidically bound. Noncovalently bound ligands are also frequent, while O-glycans form a minority. About 30% of all carbohydrate containing PDB entries comprise one or several errors. The automatic assignment of carbohydrate structures in PDB entries will improve the cross-linking of glycobiology resources with genomic and proteomic data collections, which will be an important issue of the upcoming glycomics projects. By aiding in detection of erroneous annotations and structures, the algorithm might also help to increase database quality.

a Institut fur Biochemie und Endokrinologie, Fachbereich fur Veterinarmedizin, Justus-Liebig Universitat Giesen, Frankfurter Strase 100, 35392 Giesen, Germany College of Life Sciences, Beijing University, Beijing 100871, China Department of NMR Spectroscopy, Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research, Utrecht University, Padualaan 8, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands d Zentrale Spektroskopie, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, Im Neuenheimer Feld 280, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany College of Life Sciences, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China Centro de Investigaciones Biologicas, CSIC, Ramiro de Maeztu 9, 28040 Madrid, Spain Biochemisches Institut, Universitat Kiel, Olshausenstr. 40, D-24098 Kiel, Germany Department of Bio-Organic Chemistry, Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research, Utrecht University, Padualaan 8, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands i Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Experimental Physics, Department of Biophysics, 04001 Kosice, Slovakia j Institute of Physiological Chemistry, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, Veterinarstr. 13, D-80539 Munich, Germany