Ethnopharmacology and bioinformatic combination for leads discovery: application to phospholipase A(2) inhibitors

A program combining ethnopharmacology and bioinformatic approaches has succ essfully been applied on anti-inflammatory activity. (i) An ethnobotanical study allowed the identification of several plants associated with putative anti-inflammatory properties as potential leads, (ii) On the other hand, i t is well known that phospholipase A(2) is a target implicated in the pro-i nflammatory process. Thus, (iii) some selected plant extracts were experime ntally tested on phospholipase A,. Finally, (iv) these experimental results combined with bioinformatic tools, such as database exploitation and molec ular modeling, allowed to suggest that one compound, betulin and its oxidat ive form betulinic acid, might be responsible of the anti-PLA(2) activity. This suggestion was confirmed experimentally. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd . All rights reserved.