Many medicines are derived from natural products (NPs), small molecules produced by a variety of organisms. NP drug discovery screens these organisms for specific biological properties, with the aim to discover new molecules. However, traditional publication formats are strongly biased towards positive results, are of limited machine-readability, and are often only published years after experiments have been conducted. In this project, we explore nanopublications as a format to publish NP drug discovery results in a prospective, machine-readable, and unbiased manner. By modeling the discovery workflow as nanopublications, we are building a federated, free open source knowledge graph of experimental NP research data. Such a resource will democratize access to knowledge, connect heterogeneous, monolithic databases, and lead to an abundance of linked open data, accelerating NP drug discovery.
Knowledge Pixels Incubator #6: Nanopublications in Natural Product Drug Discovery