The Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) ontology is downloaded weekly from EMBL-EBI at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/. The data is made available under the Creative Commons License (CC BY 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). For more information see: Degtyarenko et al. (2008) ChEBI: a database and ontology for chemical entities of biological interest. Nucleic Acids Res. 36, D344–D350.
Parent monosaccharides are polyhydroxy aldehydes H[CH(OH)]nC(=O)H or polyhydroxy ketones H-[CHOH]n-C(=O)[CHOH]m-H with three or more carbon atoms. The generic term 'monosaccharide' (as opposed to oligosaccharide or polysaccharide) denotes a single unit, without glycosidic connection to other such units. It includes aldoses, dialdoses, aldoketoses, ketoses and diketoses, as well as deoxy sugars, provided that the parent compound has a (potential) carbonyl group.