Web search and data mining of natural products and their bioactivities in PubChem

Natural products, as major resources for drug discovery historically, are gaining more attentions recently due to the advancement in genomic sequencing and other technologies, which makes them attractive and amenable to drug candidate screening. Collecting and mining the bioactivity information of natural products are extremely important for accelerating drug development process by reducing cost. Lately, a number of publicly accessible databases have been established to facilitate the access to the chemical biology data for small molecules including natural products. Thus, it is imperative for scientists in related fields to exploit these resources in order to expedite their researches on natural products as drug leads/candidates for disease treatment. PubChem, as a public database, contains large amounts of natural products associated with bioactivity data. In this review, we introduce the information system provided at PubChem, and systematically describe the applications for a set of PubChem web services for rapid data retrieval, analysis, and downloading of natural products. We hope this work can serve as a starting point for the researchers to perform data mining on natural products using PubChem.