Plant-antivenom: Database of anti-venom medicinal plants

Saulo França Amui¹ · Renato David Puga² · Andreimar Martins Soares³ · Silvana Giuliatti*¹

¹Department of Genetics, Faculty of Medicine, University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil
²Hospital A.C. Camargo, Laboratory of Biotechnology, São Paulo, SP, Brazil
³Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

*Corresponding author: silvana@rge.fmrp.usp.br

Financial support: Plant-antivenom is supported by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).

Keywords: animal venoms, natural plant inhibitors, web system.

Plant-antivenom is a computational Websystem about medicinal plants with anti-venom properties. The system consists of a database of these plants, including scientific publications on this subject and amino acid sequences of active principles from venomous animals. The system relates these data allowing their integration through different search applications. For the development of the system, the first surveys were conducted in scientific literature, allowing the creation of a publication database in a library for reading and user interaction. Then, classes of categories were created, allowing the use of tags and the organization of content. This database on medicinal plants has information such as family, species, isolated compounds, activity, inhibited animal venoms, among others. Provision is made for submission of new information by registered users, by the use of wiki tools. Content submitted is released in accordance to permission rules defined by the system. The database on biological venom protein amino acid sequences was structured from the essential information from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Plant-antivenom's interface is simple, contributing to a fast and functional access to the system and the integration of different data registered on it. Plant-antivenom system is available on the Internet at http://gbi.fmrp.usp.br/plantantivenom.