AYUsearch: a repository to facilitate the biochemical understanding of natural products-derived chemical substances.

Ayurveda – a traditional Indian medicinal (TIM) practice advocates a lifestyle regimen utilizing natural products to cure complex ailments. The famous Ayurveda classics, viz. Charak Samhita, Ashtanga Hridayam and Sushruta Samhita, elaborate on various plant and animal products, in which the descriptions are narrated in Sanskrit and often signified through a metaphor. The particulars are empirical and usually lack experimental evidence. Its efficacy needs to be ensured towards the gold standard of biomedical sciences. Indeed, an ordered catalogue on a natural product is quintessential to designing the validation strategies for TIM. We obtained evidence on 60 natural products with a mentioned history in Ayurveda. For this, we manually curated a list of natural products-derived molecules (NDMs). Next, they were sorted into universally accepted chemical identifiers and processed into SDF formats. The 1004 gene targets were identified for 636 NDMs through molecular and reverse docking studies. Subsequently, the functional annotation of differentially expressed genes using KEGG pathways and Gene Ontology analysis unravelled the role of the scrutinized ligands on cell functions. AYUsearch (database) is an attempt to redefine the information embedded in Ayurveda, where the biological role of natural chemical products is decoded through network pharmacology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]