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Glycans are the main plant cell wall components. They are known to have effects on nutrition and hold strong potential in green chemistry, but further applications are bottlenecked by the unmet challenge of resolving their precise structure.

Tandem-mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is a mainstay analytical technique for resolving the structure of biopolymers. However, a shortage of good-quality reference leaves this high-throughput technology underequipped in terms of tools to support an automated workflow for reading mass spectra, especially for plant glycans.

The structural analysis of these complex molecules demands specific methodological developments where the interpretation of mass spectra has to be done manually, which is a painstaking and laborious task that fails to capitalize on the powerful analyses carried out.

The BIBS platform has developed two software packages, Oligator and mzLabelEditor, to facilitate the interpretation of mass spectra and the collection of spectral reference data. These two software programs standardize the process of structural sketch-up and annotation of MS/MS spectra but keep the flexibility needed to explore new chemical forms of oligosaccharides.