Examination of patterns in potential or known short subsequences in small proteins or domains known to have a function involving non-covalent sialic acid binding and, in absence of any clear patterns, study of the amino acid content of the subsequences. This established a preliminary sialic acid glycan binding score (SABS) for the twenty naturally occurring amino acid residues. However, the short subsequences identified were to be considered as “signals” or “fingerprints” for sialic acid glycan binding domains as a whole. That is, direct contact with sialic acid was not necessarily at (or solely at) the specific short subsequence, for reasons discussed in Results Section 4. This, plus a sequence rather than three dimensional structure perspective, and a specific focus on binding sialic acid glycans rather than sugars in general, resulted in a substantial difference in scores from another major method of predicting sugar binding regions of proteins also discussed later below.