Public databases of plant natural products for computational drug discovery.

Abstract

Plant natural products have been intensively investigated during the past decades with a considerable amount of generated data. Databases are subsequently developed to facilitate the management and analysis of accumulated information including plant species, chemical compounds, structures and bioactivities. With the support of databases, the screening of novel bioactivities for plant natural products can benefit from advanced computational methods to accelerate the progress of drug discovery. This overview describes the contents of publicly available databases useful for computational research of plant natural products. Based on the databases, quantitative structure-activity relationship models and protein-ligand docking methods can be developed and applied to analyze and screen bioactive compounds. More public and structured databases with unique contents, search functions and links to major databases are needed for efficiently exploring the chemical space of plant natural products.