About Phytochemica
Plant-derived molecules (PDMs) are known to be a rich source of diverse scaffolds that could serve as a basis for rational drug design. Structured compilation of phytochemicals from traditional medicinal plants can facilitate prospection for novel PDMs and their analogs as therapeutic agents. Herein, we present Phytochemica, a structured library of phytochemicals from five medicinally important Himalayan plants: Atropa belladonna (ATBE), Catharanthus roseus (CARS), Heliotropium indicum (HEIN), Picrorhiza kurroa (PIKU), and Podophyllum hexandrum (POHX). These plants are reported to have immense therapeutic properties against various diseases. It is a structured compilation of 963 PDMs from these medicinal plants, inclusive of their plant part source, chemical classification, IUPAC names, SMILES notations, physicochemical properties, and 3-dimentional chemical structures with associated references. It also offers provision for refined search option to identify analogs of natural molecules against ZINC database at user-defined cut-off. Availability of this structured dataset may enable their direct use in in silico drug discovery which will hasten the process of lead identification from natural compounds under proposed hypothesis, and may overcome the urgent need of phytomedicines. Compilation and accessibility of indigenous phytochemicals and their derivatives can be a source of considerable advantage to research institutes as well as industries.
Cite as: Pathania,S., Ramakrishnan,S.M., and Bagler,G. Phytochemica: a platform to explore phytochemicals of medicinal plants. Database (2015) Vol. 2015: article ID bav075; doi:10.1093/database/bav075
SerpentinaDB has been ported to IIIT-Delhi and is now been available at http://faculty.iiitd.ac.in/~bagler/webservers/Phytochemica