ePlantLIBRA: A composition and biological activity database for bioactive compounds in plant food supplements

Highlights

• The development of ePlantLIBRA a comprehensive web-based plant food supplement (PFS) database.

• A comprehensive and searchable database containing quality evaluated scientific information from over 570 publications included covering 70 PFS or their botanical ingredients.

• Data included on PFS health benefits, adverse effects and bioactives composition.

• Data included on botanical information, contaminants and residues.

• Valuable resource for food regulatory and advisory bodies, researchers and product developers.

Abstract

The newly developed ePlantLIBRA database is a comprehensive and searchable database, with up-to-date coherent and validated scientific information on plant food supplement (PFS) bioactive compounds, with putative health benefits as well as adverse effects, and contaminants and residues. It is the only web-based database available compiling peer reviewed publications and case studies on PFS. A user-friendly, efficient and flexible interface has been developed for searching, extracting, and exporting the data, including links to the original references. Data from over 570 publications have been quality evaluated and entered covering 70 PFS or their botanical ingredients.

Introduction

Worldwide, there is a growing demand for high-quality, safe, health-promoting or disease-risk reducing foods, including food supplements (Council of Europe, 2005, FDA, 2004). The goal of the European Commission financed, Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project, PlantLIBRA (PLANT food supplements: Levels of Intake, Benefit and Risk Assessment) (Larranaga-Guetaria, 2012) was to improve the plant food supplement (PFS) scientific knowledge base to better assess the risks and benefits of PFS, and enable science-based decision making by regulators and stakeholders, ultimately ensuring a safer use of PFS by consumers. In order to make informed decisions, competent authorities and industry require better tools such as databases to provide more accessible and quality-assured information. Consequently, an objective of the PlantLIBRA project was to transfer this body of knowledge to a meta-database and a single platform with easily searchable and retrievable data on beneficial bioactivity data, botanical information, case reports of adverse effects, chemical composition, and potential contaminants in PFS for PFS risk–benefit assessments.

Regulators and manufacturers are very well aware of the issues relating to botanicals and the need for good quality assurance and control. They also realise that illegal marketing practices by unscrupulous manufacturers, adulteration with medicinal products (Cohen, 2009), accessibility of unsafe products over the Internet, etc. are hard to address by strict rules and increased enforcement. There is, therefore, no doubt that everybody will benefit from science-based safety measures and that the data uploaded on ePlantLIBRA database will contribute to that knowledge.

The European Food Safety Authority (European Food Safety Authority, 2009, European Food Safety Authority, 2012) has published and made available a Compendium of Botanicals reported to contain toxic, addictive, psychotropic or other substances of concern to provide guidance for safety assessment of botanicals and botanical preparations used as plant supplements. This compendium lists in alphabetical order botanicals, their chemicals of concern, remarks on adverse/toxic effects and lists the references. While it does not yet include toxicological endpoints for individual plant compounds and preparations, the ePlantLIBRA provides a larger and more detailed resource. As a searchable database it has more detailed coverage than the Compendium. The database contains additional quality evaluated composition data, beneficial health effects, adverse effects, contaminants and residues. ePlantLIBRA plants are searchable by common and scientific name, additionally reports can be found by compound name(s) and, as extra value, links to all references are downloadable.

Since the ePlantLIBRA database combines literature on the beneficial and relevant adverse biological effects of PFS in a single platform, it is particularly useful in the risk–benefit assessment of botanicals for use in PFS using the methods described by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA, 2012). The EFSA (2012) guidance proposes a safety assessment methodology based on two tiers, taking into account the amount of evidence available; it recognises the relevance of human studies and adverse event reports, which ePLantLIBRA provides, in addition to the indispensable laboratory tests. To ensure that claims about the health benefits of foods and food constituents are accurate and not misleading to consumers, the European Commission (EC) adopted a regulation on the use of nutrition and health claims in December 2006 [Regulation (EC) 1924/5 2006] (European Parliament and Council, 2006) (Buttriss & Benelam, 2010).

In this article the development of the ePlantLIBRA database is described including retrieval of quality evaluated data from over 570 publications covering 70 PFS or their botanical ingredients. All plants are described using LanguaL™, an international framework for food description (Langual.org 2014), with accompanying data including scientific name, synonyms, common name in 15 European languages, colour photograph identification and links to the Germplasm Resources Information Network (ENDRESS, GRIN National Genetic Resources Program GRIN, 2014). The database contains a sophisticated data retrieval system, allowing users to search for specific information to suit their requirements. Searches can be limited by plant, PFS, adverse effects, beneficial bioeffects data, biomarkers, composition data, compound class, compound, contaminants, study quality, or any combination of these.