You can find my list of publications on my ORCID profile or more details on my Publications page.
NAPRALERT
NAPRALERT, acronym of NAtural PRoducts ALERT, is a database created at UIC in 1975 by the late Norman R. Farnsworth. The database aims at being a systematic and curated database of all the research related to Natural Products and Pharmacognosy in general. It includes but is not limited to the coverage of:
- Traditional use of plants and Natural Products
- Distribution of compounds produced/present in organisms
- Distribution of organisms producing/presenting a compound
- Biological assays in-vitro and in-vivo of organisms, extracts or purified compounds
The new infrastructure
The database was running until 2015 on an aging IT infrastructure that was both costly and difficult to maintain and enhance. This is why Guido Pauli recently appointed director of NAPRALERT, James Graham, its current editor, and I decided that it would greatly benefit from a complete rewrite. A more detailed story is available in my portfolio.
What can be done with it
An example of what can be done in term of advanced data analysis has been described in our Open Access paper: Can Invalid Bioactives Undermine Natural Product-Based Drug Discovery?
We used Python, Jupyter Notebooks, Pandas, Bokeh to clean, treat and analyze the behavior of Natural Products chemists such as their most studied compounds and put in evidence that their behavior is following Power laws.
But many other works from academia and in industry have benefited from NAPRALERT, some can be found on Google Scholar.