Natural products (NPs) are often regarded as sources of drugs or drug leads or simply as a "source of inspiration" for the discovery of novel drugs. We have built the Northern African Natural Products Database (NANPDB) by collecting information on ∼4500 NPs, covering literature data for the period from 1962 to 2016. The data cover compounds isolated mainly from plants, with contributions from some endophyte, animal (e.g., coral), fungal, and bacterial sources. The compounds were identified from 617 source species, belonging to 146 families. Computed physicochemical properties, often used to predict drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, as well as predicted toxicity information, have been included for each compound in the data set. This is the largest collection of annotated natural compounds produced by native organisms from Northern Africa. While the database includes well-known drugs and drug leads, the medical potential of a majority of the molecules is yet to be investigated. The database could be useful for drug discovery efforts, analysis of the bioactivity of selected compounds, or the discovery of synthesis routes toward secondary metabolites. The current version of NANPDB is available at http://african-compounds.org/nanpdb/ .

Traditional medicinal practices have a profound influence on the daily lives of people living in developing countries, particularly in Africa, since the populations cannot generally afford the cost of Western medicines. We have undertaken to investigate the correlation between the uses of plants in Traditional African medicine and the biological activities of the derived natural products, with the aim to validate the use of traditional medicine in Northern African communities. The literature is covered for the period 1959–2015 and part III of this review series focuses on plant families with names beginning with letters T to Z. The authors have focused on curating data from journals in natural products and phytomedicine. Within each journal home page, a query search based on country name was conducted. All articles “hits” were then verified, one at a time, that the species was harvested within the Northern African geographical regions. The current data partly constitutes the bases for the development of the Northern African natural compounds database. The review discusses 284 plant-based natural compounds from 34 species and 11 families. It was observed that the ethnobotanical uses of less than 40 % of the plant species surveyed correlated with the bioactivities of compounds identified.Graphical AbstractElectronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13659-016-0091-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.