Unlocking Africa’s Antidiabetic Phytochemical Diversity
AfroDiabDB consolidates 251 curated occurrence records from 48 African medicinal plant species across 28 botanical families, resolved into standardized molecular graphs with computed physicochemical descriptors and drug-likeness benchmarking against 19 FDA-approved antidiabetic drugs.
FAIR Data Archive
Curated academic dataset of antidiabetic natural products, University of Lagos.
Bridging the Gap in African Phytomedicine & Drug Discovery
Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) places a rapidly growing and disproportionate clinical burden on Sub-Saharan Africa. While indigenous African medicinal flora have been investigated for generations, crucial chemical data, molecular structures, and biological assay records remained scattered across disparate publications without standardized digital representations.
General-purpose chemical repositories such as PubChem, ChEMBL, and COCONUT lack specialized geographical and antidiabetic therapeutic focus. AfroDiabDB bridges this divide by providing:
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RDKit-Based Structure Standardization:
Canonical SMILES, 198 unique InChIKeys, valence sanitization, and explicit stereochemistry cross-referenced against PubChem CIDs.
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Multi-Criteria Drug-Likeness Profiling:
Evaluation against Lipinski's Rule of Five, Veber's criteria, Ghose filter, and Quantitative Estimate of Drug-Likeness (QED).
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Direct Benchmark Against 19 FDA Antidiabetic Drugs:
Identical computational analysis applied to approved therapeutics (Metformin, Sitagliptin, Glimepiride, etc.) for chemical-space comparison.
Ethnobotanical Scope
48 indigenous species covering West, East, Central, and Southern African antidiabetic traditional practice, led by Carica papaya, Moringa oleifera, and Vernonia amygdalina.
Phytochemical Classes
Flavonoids and phenolic compounds account for 53.8% of curated records, complemented by terpenoids, alkaloids, saponins, and tannins with documented α-glucosidase/α-amylase inhibition.
PCA Chemical Space
Principal Component Analysis reveals African phytochemicals occupy a complementary, structurally diverse chemical volume overlapping approved antidiabetic agents.
Virtual Screening Ready
Export ready-to-dock 2D/3D structures for computational screening against validated diabetic targets (α-glucosidase, DPP-4, PPAR-γ, SGLT2).
Prominent African Plant Families
Featured Antidiabetic Lead Candidates
Partner with Our Research Team on African Antidiabetic Natural Products
We actively seek research grant funding, institutional partnerships, pharmaceutical co-development, and academic co-authoring to expand in vitro screening (α-glucosidase, DPP-4) and molecular dynamics simulations.