Covering: up to 2014 In silico approaches have been widely recognised to be useful for drug discovery. Here, we consider the significance of available databases of medicinal plants and chemo- and bioinformatics tools for in silico drug discovery beyond the traditional use of folk medicines. This review contains a practical example of the application of combined chemo- and bioinformatics methods to study pleiotropic therapeutic effects (known and novel) of 50 medicinal plants from Traditional Indian Medicine.

Summary: A new freely available web server site of metabolism predictor to predict the sites of metabolism (SOM) based on the structural formula of chemicals has been developed. It is based on the analyses of ‘structure-SOM’ relationships using a Bayesian approach and labelled multilevel neighbourhoods of atoms descriptors to represent the structures of over 1000 metabolized xenobiotics. The server allows predicting SOMs that are catalysed by 1A2, 2C9, 2C19, 2D6 and 3A4 isoforms of cytochrome P450 and enzymes of the UDP-glucuronosyltransferase family. The average invariant accuracy of prediction that was calculated for the training sets (using leave-one-out cross-validation) and evaluation sets is 0.9 and 0.95, respectively. Availability and implementation: Freely available on the web at http://www.way2drug.com/SOMP. Contact:rudik_anastassia@mail.ru Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

In vitro cell-line cytotoxicity is widely used in the experimental studies of potential antineoplastic agents and evaluation of safety in drug discovery. In silico estimation of cytotoxicity against hundreds of tumor cell lines and dozens of normal cell lines considerably reduces the time and costs of drug development and the assessment of new pharmaceutical agent perspectives. In 2018, we developed the first freely available web application (CLC-Pred) for the qualitative prediction of cytotoxicity against 278 tumor and 27 normal cell lines based on structural formulas of 59,882 compounds. Here, we present a new version of this web application: CLC-Pred 2.0. It also employs the PASS (Prediction of Activity Spectra for Substance) approach based on substructural atom centric MNA descriptors and a Bayesian algorithm. CLC-Pred 2.0 provides three types of qualitative prediction: (1) cytotoxicity against 391 tumor and 47 normal human cell lines based on ChEMBL and PubChem data (128,545 structures) with a mean accuracy of prediction (AUC), calculated by the leave-one-out (LOO CV) and the 20-fold cross-validation (20F CV) procedures, of 0.925 and 0.923, respectively; (2) cytotoxicity against an NCI60 tumor cell-line panel based on the Developmental Therapeutics Program’s NCI60 data (22,726 structures) with different thresholds of IG₅₀ data (100, 10 and 1 nM) and a mean accuracy of prediction from 0.870 to 0.945 (LOO CV) and from 0.869 to 0.942 (20F CV), respectively; (3) 2170 molecular mechanisms of actions based on ChEMBL and PubChem data (656,011 structures) with a mean accuracy of prediction 0.979 (LOO CV) and 0.978 (20F CV). Therefore, CLC-Pred 2.0 is a significant extension of the capabilities of the initial web application.