The Chapman & Hall/CRC Chemical Database is a structured database holding information on chemical substances. It includes descriptive and numerical data on chemical, physical and biological properties of compounds; systematic and common names of compounds; literature references; structure diagrams and their associated connection tables. The Dictionary of Natural Products Online is a subset of this database and includes all compounds contained in the Dictionary of Natural Products (Main Work and Supplements).
The Dictionary of Natural Products (DNP) is the only comprehensive and fully-edited database on natural products. It arose as a daughter product of the well-known Dictionary of Organic Compounds (DOC) which, since its inception in the 1930s has, through successive editions, always been a leading source of natural product information.
In the early 1980s, following the publication of the Fifth Edition of DOC, the first to be founded on database methods, the Editors and contributors for the various classes of natural products embarked on a programme of enlargement, rationalisation and classification of the natural product entries, while at the same time keeping the coverage up-to-date. In 1992 the results of this major project, which had grown to match DOC in size, were separately published in both book (7 volumes) and CD-ROM format, leaving DOC with coverage of only the most widely distributed and/or practically important natural products. DNP compilation has since continued unabated by a combination of an exhaustive survey of current literature and of historical sources such as reviews to pick up minor natural products and items of data previously overlooked.
The compilation of DNP is undertaken by a team of academics and freelancers who work closely with the in-house editorial staff at Chapman & Hall. Each contributor specialises in a particular natural product class (e.g. alkaloids) and is able to reorganise and classify the data in the light of new research so as to present it in the most consistent and logical manner possible. Thus the compilation team is able to reconcile errors and inconsistencies.
The resulting on-line version represents an extremely well organised dictionary documenting virtually every known natural product.
A valuable feature of the design is that closely related natural products (e.g. where one is a glycoside or simple ester of another) are organised into the same entry, thus simplifying and bringing out the underlying structural and biosynthetic relationships of the compounds. Structure diagrams are drawn and numbered in the most consistent way according to best stereochemical and biogenetic relationships. In addition, every natural product is indexed by structural/biogenetic type under one of more than 1000 headings, allowing the rapid location of all compounds in the category, even where they have undergone biogenetic modification and no longer share exactly the same skeleton.
There is extensive (but not complete) coverage of natural products of unknown structure, and the coverage of these is currently being enhanced by various retrospective searches.