The study of carbohydrate sugar chains, or glycans, has been one of slow progress mainly due to the difficulty in establishing standard methods for analyzing their structures and biosynthesis. Glycans are generally tree structures that are more complex than linear DNA or protein sequences, and evidence shows that patterns in glycans may be present that spread across siblings and into further regions that are not limited by the edges in the actual tree structure itself. Current models were not able to capture such patterns.