Designing potential extensions from G-SRS to ChEBI to identify natural product-drug interactions

Botanical and other natural products (NPs) are not as widely represented in biomedical ontologies compared to conventional drugs. The growing use of NPs that have been implicated in clinically significant pharmacokinetic NP–drug interactions (NPDIs) renders addressing this knowledge gap imperative. In this study, we designed potential logical extensions to the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) ontology that map information about NPs and NP constituents from the Global Substance Registration System (G-SRS). We extracted information from the G-SRS database using SQL; created semantically consistent logical representations for the case NPs - kratom, goldenseal, and green tea; and integrated them within the ChEBI ontology. The merged ontology contains NP information in computable form and is compatible with the principles of the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry. The potential logical extensions are the first step in advancing research related to NPDIs using biomedical ontologies and knowledge graphs.