{
  "abstract": "Glycan motifs are the standard readout of comparative glycomics, and pipelines treat them as independent features. Here, we show they are not. Motifs are partially ordered by substructure containment, so a parent motif's abundance dominates each of its children. We make that order explicit as a directed acyclic graph, which stratifies the multiple-testing family correctly and, together with an empirical-Bayes variance prior taken from each motif's containment neighborhood, raises estimated true positives across 45 glycomics datasets from 300 to 442 (+47%, p = 0.0001) after controlling for permutation-null false positives. Because a parent's children and its residual form a genuine sub-composition, their logratio balances need no reference frame and no scale model, and they separate a motif's own change from one inherited from its contexts. Of 337 significant parent motifs, 150 (45%) thus carry no signal of their own, while 138 motifs move only in the decomposition. We present case studies for both glycomics and glycoproteomics, including a recurrent reapportioning of core-1 sialylation at the immune-inhibitory disialyl-T antigen across eight human O-glycomes, and a colorectal fucosylation shift confined to the antenna, neither of which any marginal analysis reports.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "University of Gothenburg"
  ],
  "article_type": "New results",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 2,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "X. Zhao"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "D. Bojar"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/fbhat2kz7r7j6.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.64898/2026.09.10.750563",
  "fulltext_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.750563v1.full",
  "id": "fbhat2kz7r7j6",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.750563v1",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-ND",
  "licence_label": "CC BY-ND",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "biorxiv",
      "bioinformatics"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "1312|Glycosylation and Glycoproteins Research"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7213300249",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.750563v1.full.pdf",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-10",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/fbhat2kz7r7j6.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:22:35Z",
      "native_id": "10.64898/2026.09.10.750563",
      "source": "biorxiv",
      "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.10.750563v1"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "biorxiv:bioinformatics",
      "subfield": "bioinformatics"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Expressing glycan motifs as a containment order increases sensitivity and uncovers motif redistributions",
  "title_text": "Expressing glycan motifs as a containment order increases sensitivity and uncovers motif redistributions",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:22:35Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/fbhat2kz7r7j6",
  "venue": "bioRxiv",
  "versions": []
}