Title:Virtual Screening of Natural Products Database
Volume: 21
Issue: 18
Author(s): José Alixandre de Sousa Luis, Renata Priscila Costa Barros, Natália Ferreira de Sousa, Eugene Muratov, Luciana Scotti and Marcus Tullius Scotti*
Affiliation:
- Postgraduate Program in Natural Products and Synthetic Bioactive, Federal University of Paraiba, Joao Pessoa, Paraiba,Brazil
Keywords:
Natural products, natural products databases, virtual screening, ligand-based, structure-based, drug candidates.
Abstract: Constant research on natural products has generated, over time, a large number of
compounds with the potential to be evaluated in several biological tests and subsequently have been
cataloged in databases that allow other researchers to perform virtual screenings of activity in various
biological systems. This considerably reduces the time for the development of new drugs. This review
describes the main databases of natural products available for searching bioactive compounds. It also
describes the main features of virtual screening strategies for the identification of molecules with the
potential to be used as new drugs. In addition, a search was made in the Web of Science database,
using the search term "Virtual screening of natural products databases" from 2003 to 2018. The search
criterion resulted in 230 articles, which had their abstracts evaluated with pertinence to the criteria
required for this work, which are: a) be a research article; b) performing a virtual screening on
databases of natural products or containing natural products; and c) works that identified drug
candidate molecules. Based on these criteria, the bibliographic review on the topic was excluded. After
this analysis, 104 works were selected for this review. We selected relevant papers describing the
potential drug candidates that were distributed in 15 classes, of which the anticancer, antibacterial and
anti-inflammatory hits were the most abundant. The works showing efforts to search for new
molecules against various other diseases in distinct biological systems were also described. In this way,
this work shows an overview of several methodologies and we hope they can help and inspire the
development of new research to improve people's quality of life.
