SuperNatural: a searchable database of available natural compounds.
Although tremendous effort has been put into synthetic libraries, most drugs on the market are still natural compounds or derivatives thereof. There are encyclopaedias of natural compounds, but the availability of these compounds is often unclear and catalogues from numerous suppliers have to be checked. To overcome these problems we have compiled a database of approximately 50,000 natural compounds from different suppliers. To enable efficient identification of the desired compounds, we have implemented substructure searches with typical templates. Starting points for in silico screenings are about 2500 well-known and classified natural compounds from a compendium that we have added. Possible medical applications can be ascertained via automatic searches for similar drugs in a free conformational drug database containing WHO indications. Furthermore, we have computed about three million conformers, which are deployed to account for the flexibilities of the compounds when the 3D superposition algorithm that we have developed is used. The SuperNatural Database is publicly available at http://bioinformatics.charite.de/supernatural. Viewing requires the free Chime-plugin from MDL (Chime) or Java2 Runtime Environment (MView), which is also necessary for using Marvin application for chemical drawing.
Dunkel
Mathias
M
Berlin Center of Genome Based Bioinformatics, 3D Datamining Group, Institute of Biochemistry, Charité-University Medicine Berlin, Monbijoustrasse 2, 10117 Berlin, Germany. mathias.dunkel@charite.de
Fullbeck
Melanie
M
Neumann
Stefanie
S
Preissner
Robert
R
D000890:Anti-Infective Agents / Q000737:chemistry / Q000627:therapeutic use; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004358:Drug Therapy; D020407:Internet; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations / Q000737:chemistry*; D014584:User-Computer Interface
D000890:Anti-Infective Agents; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations