Towards a unified Latin American Natural Products Database: LANaPD

Abstract

Around the world, the number of compound databases of natural products in the public domain is rising. This is in line with the increasing synergistic combination of natural product research and chemoinformatics. Toward this global endeavor, countries in Latin America are assembling, curating, and analyzing the contents and diversity of natural products available in their geographical regions. In this manuscript we collect and analyze the efforts that countries in Latin America have made so far to build natural product databases. We further encourage the scientific community in particular in Latin America, to continue their efforts to building quality natural product databases and, whenever possible, to make them publicly accessible. It is proposed that all compound collections could be assembled into a unified resource called LANaPD: Latin American Natural Products Database. Opportunities and challenges to build, distribute and maintain LANaPD are also discussed.