The study of entire complement of sugars, free or present in more complex molecules in an organism), including genetic, physiologic, pathologic, and other aspects. Glycans participate in every biological process from intracellular signaling to organ development to tumor growth. The field of genomics arose from the availability of complete genome sequence data as well as computational methods for their analysis. One of the surprising findings from analysis of the human genome was the presence of fewer protein-encoding genes (a mere 25,000) than had been predicted earlier. Furthermore, the protein-encoding (i.e., “expressed”) genes comprise a small fraction, less than 2%, of the human genome. These genes are transcribed into mRNAs that are often referred to collectively as the “transcriptome.”