With the recent explosion of information, Natural Products (NP) research critically
needs efficient ways to access and share knowledge, also to save precious knowledge
being lost [1]. The reporting and sharing of NP occurrences in biological organisms are relevant
to numerous scientific fields ranging from drug discovery to chemical ecology or chemotaxonomy.
Through the LOTUS initiative, we aim to offer better knowledge sharing in NP research.
We established a data harmonization, curation, and validation pipeline to gather and
appropriately document structure-organism pairs. These pairs are then shared through
the Wikidata platform. Wikidata is particularly indicated for the sharing of knowledge
in life sciences as demonstrated in [2]. We made 700,000+referenced structure-organism pairs available on Wikidata. As an
example, it is, now possible to retrieve biological organisms containing chemical
compounds described as anti-infective (https://w.wiki/vo9). This offers exciting perspectives, linking information gained over different, sometimes
disconnected, fields of investigation.
