PhytoLongevityDB is an online database that brings together information about plants and foods, the chemical compounds they contain, and their association with human genes related to longevity and ageing. The goal is to facilicate the search for natural compounds and plants that can play a role in understanding ageing and treat its adverse effects.

Features

• Four main types of entities are linked together: plants, compounds, metabolic pathways, and genes. Chemical compounds are related to human genes via common metabolic pathways that they participate in. The compounds are also connected to the plants that contain them.
• The links in the main navigation menu lead to pages that list all members of a specific entity types. For each member there's a set of links that lead to other related entities. For example, one can navigate to the Plants page and find the Aloe Vera entry. The links in the Links column can be used to find compounds, metabolic pathways or genes connected to Aloe Vera.
• Graph view - The graph view shows an interactive Sankey diagram of the complete graph of entities connected to an object of interest. For example, one may observe all connections for a given plant or gene of interest.
• Scoring - for each plant we calculate a simple score that shows how strong association does the plant have to ageing-related genes.

Data sources

PhytoLongevityDB combines information from various online databases:

• Plants - data for plants (and foods) and the compounds they contain have been taken from CMAUP and FOODB.ca.
• Compounds and metabolic pathways - data for compounds and the metabolic pathways in which they participate have been collected from KEGG, Reactome, WikiPathways, and PathBank.
• Genes - we used HAGR to obtain genes related to ageing. The genes were linked to metabolic pathways using information from KEGG.