Phytochemical informatics: An insight for biological research

Phytochemicals are profoundly used to treat different diseases across the world and have been reported in numerous traditional medicine systems. Phytochemical informatics is composed of various databases, analytical and screening methods used for phytochemical compounds. The phytochemical information stored in databases has various structures which help users to retrieve and analyze large scale data by computational methods. These databases are growing precipitously with the steep expansion of chemical information. Currently, chemical databases have wide applications from novel drug designing, virtual screening, docking, interaction studies to the development of algorithms. These are used for analyzing large scale experimental data and comparison. Chemical databases usually cover all aspects of chemical compounds viz. structure, physicochemical properties, metabolism, reaction, targets, side effects, metabolic pathways in diseases, interactions and reactions. We have compiled the latest phytochemical databases, with their features along with their application for researchers to explore and expand for defining new avenues of phytochemical informatics.