In the field of drug discovery and development, natural products have long been known to be a valuable source of biologically active compounds, forming the basis of many therapeutic agents. However, accessing and using this data presents several challenges. While numerous sources provide information on natural products, databases often need help to remain online and undergo active maintenance. Information about a compound may differ across multiple sources, and different databases store varying sets of information about a compound, making data from one database incompatible with another. Additionally, there are challenges in obtaining licenses to use the available data, as licensing requirements differ from source to source, leading to confusion in the research community. In response to these challenges, the original COCONUT was developed in 2021. As the volume and complexity of natural product data increased, there arose a need for a platform that could address the scalability challenges of the database while meeting the evolving demands of the scientific community. In 2024, COCONUT was released to fulfil these researchers' needs.
COlleCtion of Open NatUral producTs (COCONUT) is an open-source platform that collaboratively aggregates and curates data on natural products. The original 2021 version of COCONUT aggregated data from 53 open Natural Product Collections, and this has now increased to more than 63 in the latest 2024 release. The updated platform provides tools for community collaborations in data curation to empower researchers with reliable information on natural products, thereby enhancing the research ecosystem in this field. To ensure accountability and transparency in the curation process, the platform maintains extensive audit trails on user actions. In summary, the 2024 release of the platform not only includes a larger collection of natural products but also enhanced capabilities to ensure the data is of high quality.
What are Natural Products?
Natural products are small bioactive molecules produced by living organisms with potential applications in pharmacology and various industries. COCONUT facilitates NP research, enabling computational screening and other in-silico applications.
Citation Guidelines
Citing Paper
Venkata Chandrasekhar, Kohulan Rajan, Sri Ram Sagar Kanakam, Nisha Sharma, Viktor Weißenborn, Jonas Schaub, Christoph Steinbeck,
COCONUT 2.0: a comprehensive overhaul and curation of the collection of open natural products database, Nucleic Acids Research, 2024;, gkae1063,
https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkae1063Sorokina, M., Merseburger, P., Rajan, K. et al.
COCONUT online: Collection of Open Natural Products database.
J Cheminform 13, 2 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13321-020-00478-9Citing Software
Venkata, C., Kanakam, S. R. S., Sharma, N., Schaub, J., Steinbeck, C., & Rajan, K. (2024).
COCONUT (Version v0.0.1 - prerelease) [Computer software].
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13283949Support mail
Write to us at info.COCONUT@uni-jena.de for any issues or support requests.
Discussion Forum
Join our COCONUT Discussion Forum at coconut-discuss@listserv.uni-jena.de
Acknowledgments
COCONUT project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under the ChemBioSys (Project INF) - Project number: 239748522 - SFB 1127.
