The Functional Glycomics Gateway is a comprehensive and free online resource provided by the Consortium for Functional Glycomics (CFG). It is aimed at providing you with data, tools, resources, and information about community activities in the growing field of functional glycomics.

As the portal to the CFG program, the Functional Glycomics Gateway offers free access to data that have been produced by the CFG's Scientific Core laboratories; integrated molecule databases for glycan-binding proteins, glycan structures, and glycosyltransferases; and information about resources and services the CFG offers to the scientific community.

In 2006, the CFG teamed up with the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) to create the Functional Glycomics Gateway, which encompassed the existing CFG website and databases and the Functional Glycomics Update from NPG. As of September 1, 2011 the Functional Glycomics Gateway is supported solely by the CFG. Archived Update material is available in the Functional Glycomics Archive.

The CFG is a large international research initiative that works with and serves the scientific community. Its mission is to provide a networking forum and glycomics resources which enable investigators to reveal functions of glycans and glycan-binding proteins that impact human health and disease. The CFG offers glycan microarray screening services, a reagent bank, and free access to its extensive data repositories and molecule databases.

The program was created in 2001 with funding from an NIGMS Large-Scale Collaborative Project Award, also known as a 'glue grant,' to define paradigms by which protein-carbohydrate interactions mediate cell communication. Prior to the CFG's transition to non-glue grant funding in 2011, it offered glycan profiling analysis, glyco-gene microarray screening, mouse phenotyping, and novel glycogene knockout mouse strains, as well as the currently available glycan array screening and reagent bank services. All datasets that have been produced using these resources are freely available in the CFG relational database. The CFG also developed molecule databases for glycan-binding proteins, glycan structures, and glycosyltransferases, which integrate CFG-generated data and information from other publicly available databases. The CFG datasets and the molecule databases are highly interconnected, representing an important step towards an integrated systems biology approach to glycobiology.

The CFG has a large membership of Participating Investigators (PIs), each of whom has a research program within the scope of the CFG's goals. PIs are self-assigned into Subgroups based on their specific research interests, and have the opportunity to network, form collaborations and solve problems in CFG workshops and meetings.