title: The Tropical Biominer Project: mining old sources for new drugs.
abstract: The Tropical Biominer Project is a recent initiative from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the Oswaldo Cruz foundation, with the participation of the Biominas Foundation (Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil) and the start-up Homologix. The main objective of the project is to build a new resource for the chemogenomics research, on chemical compounds, with a strong emphasis on natural molecules. Adopted technologies include the search of information from structured, semi-structured, and non-structured documents (the last two from the web) and datamining tools in order to gather information from different sources. The database is the support for developing applications to find new potential treatments for parasitic infections by using virtual screening tools. We present here the midpoint of the project: the conception and implementation of the Tropical Biominer Database. This is a Federated Database designed to store data from different resources. Connected to the database, a web crawler is able to gather information from distinct, patented web sites and store them after automatic classification using datamining tools. Finally, we demonstrate the interest of the approach, by formulating new hypotheses on specific targets of a natural compound, violacein, using inferences from a Virtual Screening procedure.
authors.affiliation: Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Centro de Pesquisas René Rachou, Barro Preto, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil., Homologix, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil. artiguenave@magic.fr
authors.forename: François
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Artiguenave
authors.forename: André
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lins
authors.forename: Wesley Dias
authors.initials: WD
authors.lastname: Maciel
authors.forename: Antonio Celso Caldeira
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Junior
authors.forename: Carla
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Nacif-Coelho
authors.forename: Maria Margarida Ribeiro
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: de Souza Linhares
authors.forename: Guilherme Correa
authors.initials: GC
authors.lastname: de Oliveira
authors.forename: Luis Humberto Rezende
authors.initials: LH
authors.lastname: Barbosa
authors.forename: Júlio César Dias
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Lopes
authors.forename: Claudionor Nunes Coelho
authors.initials: CN
authors.lastname: Junior
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000977:Antiparasitic Agents / Q000737:chemistry / Q000302:isolation & purification; D001938:Brazil; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004353:Drug Evaluation, Preclinical / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005582:Foundations; D006801:Humans; D010272:Parasitic Diseases / Q000188:drug therapy; D014584:User-Computer Interface
chemical_list: D000977:Antiparasitic Agents