sCentInDB: a database of essential oil chemical profiles of Indian medicinal plants

Essential oils are complex mixtures of volatile compounds produced by aromatic plants and widely used in personal care, food flavoring, and pharmaceutical industry due to their odor and therapeutic properties. As a high-value and low-volume organic product, optimizing plant yield and modifying composition by leveraging knowledge on chemical profiles of essential oils can lead to enhanced bioproducts. Additionally, overharvesting of wild medicinal plants, especially in India, threatens biodiversity. Essential oil profiles of such plants can help regulate their exploitation. Here, we present sCentInDB, a manually curated FAIR-compliant DataBase of Essential oil Chemical profiles of Medicinal plants of India, compiled from published literature. sCentInDB contains data on 554 Indian medicinal plants at the plant part level, encompassing 2170 essential oil profiles, 3420 chemicals, 471 plant-part-therapeutic use associations, 120 plant-part-odor associations, and 218 plant-part-color associations. sCentInDB also compiles metadata such as sample location, isolation, and analysis methods. Subsequently, an extensive analysis of the chemical space in sCentInDB was performed. By constructing a chemical similarity network, terpenoids were found to be distributed across the network, indicating greater structural diversity. Moreover, a comparison of the scaffold diversity of chemicals in sCentInDB was performed against three other aroma libraries using cyclic system retrieval curves. Altogether, sCentInDB will serve as a valuable resource for researchers working on plant volatiles and employing genetic engineering to enhance oil yield and composition. Further, sCentInDB will aid in the establishment of quality standards for essential oils and provide vital insights for therapeutic and perfumery applications. sCentInDB is accessible at https://cb.imsc.res.in/scentindb/ .