Carbohydrates are important as recognition elements in diverse molecular interactions in health and in disease processes including infections, inflammatory reactions, immune responses and cancer. Carbohydrate microarrays have emerged as essential tools to unravel these interactions. With a highly skilled research team, we have pioneered a carbohydrate microarray system unique in the number and diversity of sequence-defined oligosaccharide probes that it contains, and in its ability to detect pro tein-carbohydrate interactions with high sensitivity and specificity. We have attracted numerous collaborative initiatives with groups in this country and overseas. Some have come to fruition; others are blossoming and giving very promising results in, for example, microbe-host interactions and immunological and endogenous recognition processes. We propose to establish a Carbohydrate Microarray Resource to provide specialist carbohydrate microarray analyses to broad biomedical communities in the UK and beyond. Major objectives are: (i) maintaining and further expanding an irreplaceable carbohydrate collection; (ii) expansion of the repertoire of the microarray platform to include glycome microarrays; (iii) applying these in analyses of diverse carbohydrate-recognition systems of biomedical importance as requested by collaborators as well as for our core projects; (iv) continuing software development and collaborating with international glycomics centres for carbohydrate microarray data storage and exchange.