The Tropical Biominer Project: mining old sources for new drugs

The Tropical Biominer Project is a recent initiative from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the Oswaldo Cruz foundation, with the participation of the Biominas Foundation (Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil) and the start-up Homologix. The main objective of the project is to build...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Omics (Larchmont, N.Y.) Vol. 9; no. 2; p. 130
Main Authors:	Artiguenave, François, Lins, André, Maciel, Wesley Dias, Junior, Antonio Celso Caldeira, Nacif-Coelho, Carla, de Souza Linhares, Maria Margarida Ribeiro, de Oliveira, Guilherme Correa, Barbosa, Luis Humberto Rezende, Lopes, Júlio César Dias, Junior, Claudionor Nunes Coelho
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States 01-06-2005
Subjects:	Animals Antiparasitic Agents - chemistry Antiparasitic Agents - isolation & purification Brazil Databases, Factual Drug Evaluation, Preclinical - methods Drug Evaluation, Preclinical - statistics & numerical data Foundations Humans Parasitic Diseases - drug therapy User-Computer Interface Brazil
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Summary:	The Tropical Biominer Project is a recent initiative from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the Oswaldo Cruz foundation, with the participation of the Biominas Foundation (Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil) and the start-up Homologix. The main objective of the project is to build a new resource for the chemogenomics research, on chemical compounds, with a strong emphasis on natural molecules. Adopted technologies include the search of information from structured, semi-structured, and non-structured documents (the last two from the web) and datamining tools in order to gather information from different sources. The database is the support for developing applications to find new potential treatments for parasitic infections by using virtual screening tools. We present here the midpoint of the project: the conception and implementation of the Tropical Biominer Database. This is a Federated Database designed to store data from different resources. Connected to the database, a web crawler is able to gather information from distinct, patented web sites and store them after automatic classification using datamining tools. Finally, we demonstrate the interest of the approach, by formulating new hypotheses on specific targets of a natural compound, violacein, using inferences from a Virtual Screening procedure.
ISSN:	1536-2310
DOI:	10.1089/omi.2005.9.130