EXPLOITING MEDICINAL PLANTS AND VIROINFORMATICS FOR THE DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT OF DISEASES

Abstract

Medicinal plants are anticipated to be one of the most valuable resources for the remedial usage in the treatment of various ailments. In the past, many researches have demonstrated the importance of medicinal plants in the medicament of numerous diseases. However, the data on key medicinal plants and their therapeutic efficacy against various ailments is quite scattered and not available on a single platform. Moreover, currently there is no means/mechanism of finding the best medicinal plant(s) from numerous plants known to cure any disease. Hence, a comprehensive resource of medicinal plants, their therapeutic use, part of the plant involved and active ingredients would be quite useful for drug discovery as well as clinical applications. However, the most challenging task is how to choose the best medicinal plant(s) from the myriad of plants known to play a role in curing any specified disease. We have built a user-friendly interface DISPEL (Diseases Plants Eliminate) to access the enormous, untapped medicinal plants data in the form of graphical networks of plants and human maladies (https://compbio.iitr.ac.in/dispel). DISPEL is a compendium of medicinal plants available across the world that are used to cure infectious as well as non-infectious diseases in humans. The database hosts ~60,000 ‘medicinal plants-diseases’ linkages encompassing ~5,500 medicinal plants and ~1000 diseases. This platform provides interactive and detailed visualization of medicinal plants, diseases and their relations using comprehensible network graph representation. The user has the freedom to search the database by specifying the name of disease(s) as well as the scientific/common name(s) of plant. Each ‘medicinal plant-disease’ relation is scored based on the availability of any medicine/product based on that medicinal plant, information about active compound(s), knowledge regarding the part of plant that is effective and number of distinct articles/books/websites confirming the effectiveness of the medicinal plant. Hence, the user can find the best plant(s) that can be used to cure any desired disease(s). The DISPEL database is the first step towards generating the ‘mosteffective’ combination of plants to cure a disease since it delineates as well as ranks all the therapeutic medicinal plants for that disease. The combination of best medicinal plants can then be used to conduct clinical trials and thus pave the way for their use in clinics for treatment of diseases. The recent pandemics/epidemics of viral diseases, COVID-19 (humans) and lumpy skin disease (cattles) have kept us glued to viral research. These outbreaks have exposed the urgency for early diagnosis of viral infections, vaccine development, and discovery of novel antiviral drugs and therapeutics. To support this, there is an armamentarium of virus-specific computational tools that are currently available. This thesis also provides an overview of more than 350 viroinformatics tools encompassing all major viruses [SARS-Cov-2, Influenza virus, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Papilloma virus, Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV), Hepatitis virus, Dengue virus, Ebola virus, Zika virus etc.] and several diverse applications [structural and functional annotation, antiviral peptides development, subspecies characterization, recognition of viral recombination, inhibitors identification, phylogenetic analysis, virus-host prediction, viral metagenomics, detection of mutation(s), primer designing etc]. We have compiled an all-in-one repository for all currently available viroinformatics tools, allowing virologists to easily find the resources they require without any hassle. Resources, tools and other utilities mentioned in this thesis (Chapter 9) will not only facilitate further developments in the realm of viroinformatics but also provide tremendous fillip to translate fundamental knowledge into applied research.