Free Accessible Databases as a Source of Information about Food Components and Other Compounds with Anticancer Activity–Brief Review

Abstract

Diet is considered to be a significant factor in cancer prevention and therapy. Many food components reveal anticancer activity. The increasing number of experiments concerning the anticancer potential of chemical compounds, including food components, is a challenge for data searching. Specialized databases provide an opportunity to overcome this problem. Data concerning the anticancer activity of chemical compounds may be found in general databases of chemical compounds and databases of drugs, including specialized resources concerning anticancer compounds, databases of food components, and databases of individual groups of compounds, such as polyphenols or peptides. This brief review summarizes the state of knowledge of chemical databases containing information concerning natural anticancer compounds (e.g., from food). Additionally, the information about text- and structure-based search options and links between particular internet resources is provided in this paper. Examples of the application of databases in food and nutrition sciences are also presented with special attention to compounds that are interesting from the point of view of dietary cancer prevention. Simple examples of potential database search possibilities are also discussed.

BIOPEP-UWM Database of Bioactive Peptides: Current Opportunities

“…Our application converts amino acid sequences into the so-called aromatic SMILES. Some search engines do not utilize this version [30]. The aromatic version of the SMILES string may be converted into an alternative, so-called Kekule version using, e.g., the molecule editor of the PubChem database [99] or MarvinSketch software.…”

“…Cheminformatics is considered as an emerging method in food science [28,29]. SMILES and InChI codes, as well as InChIKeys, are used as input data for the search of molecules in chemical databases [26,30]. The supplement to our previous review [31] may provide insights on how much information about peptide bioactivity is presented in chemical databases.…”

Dietary Supplementation with the Red Seaweed Porphyra umbilicalis Protects against DNA Damage and Pre-Malignant Dysplastic Skin Lesions in HPV-Transgenic Mice

“…In fact, effective prevention efforts are critical to reduce the incidence of many types of cancer, either by withdrawing risk factors (e.g., oncogenic viruses and tobacco toxins) or by screening and treating pre-malignant lesions. A growing body of data suggests that some foods and nutrients also contribute to preventing the development of cancer [23]. Seaweeds are recognized as an important component of balanced diets in many world regions, and some species have shown anticancer activity.…”

Proposal of the Annotation of Phosphorylated Amino Acids and Peptides Using Biological and Chemical Codes

“…However, the first one is used in the PubChem database and recommended as enabling the construction of a standardized version of the molecule structures [ 67 ]. Moreover, some search engines do not accept the aromatic version of conjugated or heterocyclic aromatic rings [ 68 ], as is the case with histidine and tryptophan among the proteinogenic amino acids. The list of exemplary SMILES strings of phosphorylated amino acids is presented in Table S1 , whereas the list of representations of amino acids without phosphate groups—in Table S2 of the Supplementary Materials .…”