NANPDB: A Resource for Natural Products from Northern African Sources

Abstract

Natural products (NPs) are often regarded as sources of drugs or drug leads or simply as a "source of inspiration" for the discovery of novel drugs. We have built the Northern African Natural Products Database (NANPDB) by collecting information on ∼4500 NPs, covering literature data for the period from 1962 to 2016. The data cover compounds isolated mainly from plants, with contributions from some endophyte, animal (e.g., coral), fungal, and bacterial sources. The compounds were identified from 617 source species, belonging to 146 families. Computed physicochemical properties, often used to predict drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, as well as predicted toxicity information, have been included for each compound in the data set. This is the largest collection of annotated natural compounds produced by native organisms from Northern Africa. While the database includes well-known drugs and drug leads, the medical potential of a majority of the molecules is yet to be investigated. The database could be useful for drug discovery efforts, analysis of the bioactivity of selected compounds, or the discovery of synthesis routes toward secondary metabolites. The current version of NANPDB is available at http://african-compounds.org/nanpdb/ .

Compounds from African Medicinal Plants with Activities against Protozoal Diseases: Schistosomiasis, Trypanosomiasis and Leishmaniasis

“…These include aloinoside (73), aloin (74) and microdontin (75) from the leaf latex of A. calidophila ( Figure 14). 157 It is noteworthy that, the activities of the most potent compounds, with IC50 values ranging from 3.12 to 10.92 μM against Leishmania aethiopica and from 3.70 to 15.26 μM against Leishmania major, were comparable to the control drug amphotericin B (IC50 = 0.12 and 0.073 μM against L. aethiopica and L. major respectively).…”

“…[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67] It is our goal to provide evidence of the efficacy and potency of plants used in traditional medicine against protozoal infections. The systematic documentation of the plant-based chemical constituents of African traditional medicine and attempting to using in silico procedures to investigate their modes of action are ongoing efforts, [44][45][46]52,53 particularly on the isolated compounds from African medicinal plants (AMPs) with evaluated in vitro and/or in vivo activities against trypanosomiasis, [68][69][70][71][72][73][74] schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis 73,74 and other parasitic protozoal diseases. 4 However, the most recent review dates about 3 years back and was focused only on plants collected from Nigeria.…”

Identification of Bichalcones as Sirtuin Inhibitors by Virtual Screening and <em>in Vitro </em>Testing

“…Although the rhuschalcones 8 and 9 have been known to possess other biological activities [47][48][49][50][51][52], it is yet unclear if their cytotoxicities are related to their abilities to inhibit sirtuins. However, natural product libraries like the p-ANAPL and the newly developed NANPDB [70] libraries could be good sources to search for novel modulators of sirtuins with novel scaffolds. …”

Uttarakhand Medicinal Plants Database (UMPDB): A Platform for Exploring Genomic, Chemical, and Traditional Knowledge

“…Interestingly, within last four to five years, a huge number of public repositories have been established for medicinal plants and their derived phytochemicals. The list includes, but is not limited to MPD3 [21], Phytochemica [22], SerpentinaDB [23], FERN Ethnomedicinal Plant Database [24], Naturally Occurring Plant-based Anti-Cancer Compound-Activity-Target Database (NPACT) [25], SuperNatural [26], Herb Ingredients' Targets (HIT) [27], Cancer Resource-dataset of compound-target interactions [13], Traditional Chinese medicine database (TCMD) [28], China natural products database (CNPD) [29], Chinese herb constituents database (CHCD) [30], Bioactive plant compounds database (BPCD) [30], Nuclei of Bioassays, Ecophysiology and Biosynthesis of Natural Products Database (NuBBEDB) [31,32], Northern African Natural Products Database (NANPDB) [33], Highly potent and diverse natural product library from African medicinal plants (AfroDb) [34], Molecular modeling of potential anticancer agents from African medicinal plants (AfroCancer) [35], Database of Volatile Organic Compounds in Cancer (VOCC) [36], and Nutrient Use Efficiency (NtUE) Web-Resource [37]. However, a similar comprehensive database for Uttarakhand medicinal plants is still not available despite a recent database development by the ENVIS center on Forestry with very limited scope and information.…”