The database Seed Oil Fatty Acids (SOFA) is back on the Internet!

Abstract

In the 21st century the procurement of information and especially the processing of data is a huge challenge. In science, an inconceivable amount of new information is generated every day, but scientists have more and more difficulties to navigate the plethora of data with the aim to extract the relevant information. Databases are useful tools for collecting information on specific topics and for searching for appropriate information. Such databases are available offline, paper-based or on CD, searchable on an individual computer or online on the Internet. With the help of such databases combined with efficient query engines it is possible to navigate huge volumes of information.In the plant kingdom about 380 000 different plant species exist on earth. Plant seeds of different species represent an enormous genetic potential in terms of the lipidomic profile from which only a small part is already known. The great variability in the composition of fatty acids, tocopherols, TAGs, phospholipids, sphingolipids and sterols is the basis for different applications in a huge number of scientific disciplines. Examples are the oleochemical industry, which is searching for raw materials with a high proportion of only one specific fatty acid [1, 2], plant breeders, who have to know more about the enzyme systems of plants to which the fatty acid composition can give information [3,4] or plant chemotaxonomy and phylogenetic botany who want to clarify questions regarding hierarchy and evolutionary relationship of plant species [5,6].Since April 2012 the database Seed Oil Fatty Acids (SOFA) from the Max Rubner Institut (MRI) has been online again free of charge on the Internet at http://sofa.mri.bund.de. After the database had to be removed from the internet in 2008, it has been now replaced by a new database system programmed with the financial support of the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection provided by the project sponsor Agency of Renewable Resources (FNR) (FKZ: 08NR144) under the supervision of the MRI.In comparison to other available databases such as the bibliographical data collection Nouveau Dictionnaire de Huiles Vegetables -Compositions en acides gras or the collection of the American Oil Chemists' Society within the Official Methods and Recommended Practices with information about the physical and chemical data of about 150 commonly known vegetable oils, the SOFA database contains data about the lipidomic profile of seeds from wild plants which have been collected from the appropriate pharmaceutical, botanical and chemical literature over a period of more than 40 years. Today, SOFA contains about 18 000 tables with about 130 000 individual data of more the 7000 plant species. Additionally to the plant name (genus and species) and the family name, the tables contain at least the information about the oil content, but in most cases also the fatty acid composition is given together with the bibliographical reference from where the information was taken. Many of the tables also contain...

Plant monounsaturated fatty acids: Diversity, biosynthesis, functions and uses

“…The specific physical and chemical properties of many unusual fatty acids might explain why they are excluded from membrane lipids, where they would perturb the integrity of the membrane bilayer and have deleterious effects on cell biology [32]. Meticulous accumulation of datasets from several decades of research has allowed the development of the Seed Oil Fatty Acid (SOFA) database [33,34] and the plantFAdb.org resource, an internet-based database displaying fatty acid composition for over 9,000 plants [30]. Examination of these databases reveals more than 50 structurally distinct monounsaturated fatty acids (Figure 2).…”

PlantFAdb: a resource for exploring hundreds of plant fatty acid structures synthesized by thousands of plants and their phylogenetic relationships

“…From 1997 to 2002 these data were transferred into an electronically searchable relational database and the results became available on the Internet in 2003 as SOFA (Aitzetmüller et al ., ). After the retirement of Dr. Aitzetmüller, Bertrand Matthäus oversaw the database and provided an updated version of SOFA (http://sofa.mri.bund.de) (Matthäus, ).…”

“…SOFA compiled data collected at the Institute for Chemistry and Physics of Lipids (Münster, Germany, a former institute of the Max Rubner‐Institut) together with data from over 1400 publications spanning more than 40 years of research. An update to the database software and literature surveys became available in 2012 (Matthäus, ).…”

Molecular Control of Oil Metabolism in the Endosperm of Seeds

“…Angiosperms collectively display huge variation in the fatty acids they store in seeds [ 24 ]. Meticulous accumulation of datasets from several decades of research has led to the development of the Seed Oil Fatty Acid (SOFA) database and the PlantFAdb website, which displays over 450 different fatty-acid structures and seed fatty-acid composition data for over 9000 plants [ 56 , 57 , 58 ]. In contrast with the abundance of data describing the overall fatty-acid composition of seeds, reports describing the separate analysis of the different seed tissues accumulating oil are far less common.…”