Abstract
Around the world, the number of compound databases of natural products in the public domain is rising. This is in line with the increasing synergistic combination of natural product research and chemoinformatics. Toward this global endeavor, countries in Latin America are assembling, curating, and analyzing the contents and diversity of natural products available in their geographical regions. In this manuscript we collect and analyze the efforts that countries in Latin America have made so far to build natural product databases. We further encourage the scientific community in particular in Latin America, to continue their efforts to building quality natural product databases and, whenever possible, to make them publicly accessible. It is proposed that all compound collections could be assembled into a unified resource called LANaPD: Latin American Natural Products Database. Opportunities and challenges to build, distribute and maintain LANaPD are also discussed.
Highlights
Brazil, Mexico, and Panama have developed their databases releasing to the public the compounds and/or information of their contents
Building and maintaining all these databases are ongoing projects and the databases continue to grow as collecting the large biodiversity available in Latin American countries is challenging
Future perspective Over the 5 years, it is anticipated that the first version of the Latin American Natural Products Database: LaNaPD, proposed in this report, will be developed and be up and running
Summary
This public database was launched in 2013 as a joint effort of the Brazilian research groups Nuclei of Bioassays, Biosynthesis and Ecophysiology of Natural Products (NuBBE) of the Sao Paulo State University and the Laboratory of Computational and Medicinal Chemistry of the University of Sao Paulo. Diversity analysis & other applications The most recent published version of NuBBEDB was analyzed based on structural diversity and complexity of the chemical structures To this end, several chemoinformatic tools were employed. It was concluded that compounds in NuBBEDB are diverse in terms of molecular fingerprints, chemical scaffolds and drug-like properties. The first version with 354 molecules was compared with NuBBEDB, molecules from the Traditional Chinese Medicine database, compounds with drug indications in ChEMBL and other reference libraries of NPs. It was concluded that metabolites in CIFPMA have large scaffold diversity and has several unique scaffolds. The most recent version of CIFPMA was compared with other NPs databases including NuBBEDB and BIOFACQUIM, drugs approved for clinical use, and synthetic compounds [17]. It was concluded that compounds from synthetic origin have a larger proportion of aromatic atoms [17]
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