Sustainable use of Brazilian biodiversity: using Linked Data for natural product discovery

Abstract

This project involves the update of NuBBE Database semantic web for interoperability and metadata analysis of natural products. The biodiversity of tropical environments offers a particularly valuable potential in chemical diversity of natural products, the most traditional source for the development of new drugs. The NuBBE Database (NuBBEDB) is the first natural product library from Brazilian biodiversity, and has been recognized as an important source of information for several areas of studies. Currently, this database contains more than 2200 compounds, freely accessible online and provides valuable data such as chemical, spectral, biological, taxonomic, geographic and pharmacological information. This database is a useful research tool not only for scientific purposes but could also assist in decision-making, support public policies, private investments as well as, encouraging the preservation and sustainable use of the Brazilian biodiversity. In this project, we aim to research the aspects related to creating and managing chemical knowledge graphs to facilitate information access and sharing, as well as its use in applied machine learning. To achieve this goal, we propose to increase the organization of NuBBEDB database using taxonomies and ontology and to integrate it with other databases to cross information. The use of this enriched information will be important to drug discovery inspired in natural products, as well as increase community awareness of natural resource values and their sustainable use. (AU)