Andhìra, the database of endemic plants and their bioactive molecules in Sardinia



Plants Molecules Biological activity


What is this? Andhìra is both:

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  • the first public database containing information on Sardinian endemic plants and their secondary metabolites
  • a database system is built to contain manually curated and published data and it is aimed at botanists, computational chemists, phytochemists and pharmacologists interested in the chemical diversity of natural compounds

background

The geographical isolation marking Sardinia, as well as its morphological characteristics, caused a strong genetic selection in the regional flora developing unique chemotypes. This work aims to start a census of plants bioactive molecules and load the information inside a database. In the last years, the scientific community has been focusing on Sardinia vegetal species because of their phytochemical peculiarities.

About 10% of the total flora is indeed represented by endemic species. These are the first taxa that will be processed and included in the database. Today, many works on phytochemical characteristics are difficult to find because published in small-circulation reviews.
The final purpose is to provide the users with a data collection of both physioecological (systematic, ecological, agronomic) and phytochemical characteristics. Scientists will thus have a useful tool to arrange, develop and compare similar studies.

Partners

Andhìra is a collaborative project that involves Prof. Ballero group (University of Cagliari and CoSMeSe Consortium) and the CRS4 Bioinformatics Laboratory. The work is funded by Sardegna Ricerche.