Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

BACKGROUND: South African Natural Compounds Database (SANCDB; https://sancdb.rubi.ru.ac.za/ ) is the sole and a fully referenced database of natural chemical compounds of South African biodiversity. It is freely available, and since its inception in 2015, the database has become an important resource to several studies. Its content has been: used as training data for machine learning models; incorporated to larger databases; and utilized in drug discovery studies for hit identifications.
DESCRIPTION: Here, we report the updated version of SANCDB. The new version includes 412 additional compounds that have been reported since 2015, giving a total of 1012 compounds in the database. Further, although natural products (NPs) are an important source of unique scaffolds, they have a major drawback due to their complex structure resulting in low synthetic feasibility in the laboratory. With this in mind, SANCDB is, now, updated to provide direct links to commercially available analogs from two major chemical databases namely Mcule and MolPort. To our knowledge, this feature is not available in other NP databases. Additionally, for easier access to information by users, the database and website interface were updated. The compounds are now downloadable in many different chemical formats.
CONCLUSIONS: The drug discovery process relies heavily on NPs due to their unique chemical organization. This has inspired the establishment of numerous NP chemical databases. With the emergence of newer chemoinformatic technologies, existing chemical databases require constant updates to facilitate information accessibility and integration by users. Besides increasing the NPs compound content, the updated SANCDB allows users to access the individual compounds (if available) or their analogs from commercial databases seamlessly.

BACKGROUND: Natural products (NPs) are important to the drug discovery process. NP research efforts are expanding world-wide and South Africa is no exception to this. While freely-accessible small molecule databases, containing compounds isolated from indigenous sources, have been established in a number of other countries, there is currently no such online database in South Africa.
DESCRIPTION: The current research presents a South African natural compound database, named SANCDB. This is a curated and fully-referenced database containing compound information for 600 natural products extracted directly from journal articles, book chapters and theses. There is a web interface to the database, which is simple and easy to use, while allowing for compounds to be searched by a number of different criteria. Being fully referenced, each compound page contains links to the original referenced work from which the information was obtained. Further, the website provides a submission pipeline, allowing researchers to deposit compounds from their own research into the database.
CONCLUSIONS: SANCDB is currently the only web-based NP database in Africa. It aims to provide a useful resource for the in silico screening of South African NPs for drug discovery purposes. The database is supported by a submission pipeline to allow growth by entries from researchers. As such, we currently present SANCDB the starting point of a platform for a community-driven, curated database to further natural products research in South Africa. SANCDB is freely available at https://sancdb.rubi.ru.ac.za/.