title: SANCDB: a South African natural compound database.
abstract: 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.
  
  
  METHODS
  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/.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
authors.forename: Rowan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hatherley
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
authors.forename: David K
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
authors.forename: Thommas M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Musyoka
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
authors.forename: David L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Penkler
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
authors.forename: Ngonidzashe
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Faya
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa ; Department of Chemistry, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
authors.forename: Kevin A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Lobb
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology, Research Unit in Bioinformatics (RUBi), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.
authors.forename: Özlem
authors.initials: Ö
authors.lastname: Tastan Bishop
keywords: Chemical databases; Natural products; South Africa