Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products

Food materials designated as “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) are attracting the attention of researchers in their attempts to systematically identify compounds with putative health-related benefits. In particular, there is currently a great deal of interest in exploring possible secondary bene...

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Main Authors:	Medina-Franco, José L., Martínez-Mayorga, Karina, Peppard, Terry L., Del Rio, Alberto
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2012
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3511266/

id	pubmed-3511266
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-35112662012-12-05 Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products Medina-Franco, José L. Martínez-Mayorga, Karina Peppard, Terry L. Del Rio, Alberto Research Article Food materials designated as “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) are attracting the attention of researchers in their attempts to systematically identify compounds with putative health-related benefits. In particular, there is currently a great deal of interest in exploring possible secondary benefits of flavor ingredients, such as those relating to health and wellness. One step in this direction is the comprehensive characterization of the chemical structures contained in databases of flavoring substances. Herein, we report a comprehensive analysis of the recently updated FEMA GRAS list of flavoring substances (discrete chemical entities only). Databases of natural products, approved drugs and a large set of commercial molecules were used as references. Remarkably, natural products continue to be an important source of bioactive compounds for drug discovery and nutraceutical purposes. The comparison of five collections of compounds of interest was performed using molecular properties, rings, atom counts and structural fingerprints. It was found that the molecular size of the GRAS flavoring substances is, in general, smaller cf. members of the other databases analyzed. The lipophilicity profile of the GRAS database, a key property to predict human bioavailability, is similar to approved drugs. Several GRAS chemicals overlap to a broad region of the property space occupied by drugs. The GRAS list analyzed in this work has high structural diversity, comparable to approved drugs, natural products and libraries of screening compounds. This study represents one step towards the use of the distinctive features of the flavoring chemicals contained in the GRAS list and natural products to systematically search for compounds with potential health-related benefits. Public Library of Science 2012-11-30 /pmc/articles/PMC3511266/ /pubmed/23226386 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050798 Text en © 2012 Medina-Franco et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Medina-Franco, José L. Martínez-Mayorga, Karina Peppard, Terry L. Del Rio, Alberto
spellingShingle	Medina-Franco, José L. Martínez-Mayorga, Karina Peppard, Terry L. Del Rio, Alberto Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products
author_facet	Medina-Franco, José L. Martínez-Mayorga, Karina Peppard, Terry L. Del Rio, Alberto
author_sort	Medina-Franco, José L.
title	Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products
title_short	Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products
title_full	Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products
title_fullStr	Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products
title_full_unstemmed	Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products
title_sort	chemoinformatic analysis of gras (generally recognized as safe) flavor chemicals and natural products
description	Food materials designated as “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) are attracting the attention of researchers in their attempts to systematically identify compounds with putative health-related benefits. In particular, there is currently a great deal of interest in exploring possible secondary benefits of flavor ingredients, such as those relating to health and wellness. One step in this direction is the comprehensive characterization of the chemical structures contained in databases of flavoring substances. Herein, we report a comprehensive analysis of the recently updated FEMA GRAS list of flavoring substances (discrete chemical entities only). Databases of natural products, approved drugs and a large set of commercial molecules were used as references. Remarkably, natural products continue to be an important source of bioactive compounds for drug discovery and nutraceutical purposes. The comparison of five collections of compounds of interest was performed using molecular properties, rings, atom counts and structural fingerprints. It was found that the molecular size of the GRAS flavoring substances is, in general, smaller cf. members of the other databases analyzed. The lipophilicity profile of the GRAS database, a key property to predict human bioavailability, is similar to approved drugs. Several GRAS chemicals overlap to a broad region of the property space occupied by drugs. The GRAS list analyzed in this work has high structural diversity, comparable to approved drugs, natural products and libraries of screening compounds. This study represents one step towards the use of the distinctive features of the flavoring chemicals contained in the GRAS list and natural products to systematically search for compounds with potential health-related benefits.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2012
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3511266/
_version_	1611936920372248576

Chemoinformatic Analysis of GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) Flavor Chemicals and Natural Products

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