sCentInDB: A database of essential oil chemical profiles of Indian medicinal plants

Essential oils are complex mixtures of volatile compounds produced by aromatic plants. Due to their odor and therapeutic properties, essential oils are used in personal care, food flavoring and pharmaceutical industries. As a high-value and low-volume organic product, optimizing plant yield and modifying composition by leveraging knowledge on chemical profiles of essential oils can lead to enhanced bioproducts. To this end, we present sCentInDB, a manually curated DataBase of Essential oil Chemical profiles of Medicinal plants of India, which has been built based on information in published literature. sCentInDB is a FAIR-compliant database which compiles information on 554 Indian medicinal plants at the plant part level, encompassing 2170 essential oil profiles, 3420 chemicals, 471 plant-part-therapeutic use associations, 120 plant-part-odor associations, and 218 plant-part-color associations. For the documented essential oils, sCentInDB also compiles extensive metadata including sample location, isolation and analysis methods. Subsequently, an extensive analysis of the chemical space of essential oils documented in sCentInDB was performed. By constructing a chemical similarity network, the chemical space was found to be structurally diverse with terpenoids distributed across the network. Moreover, a comparison of the scaffold diversity in sCentInDB was performed against three other aroma libraries using cyclic system retrieval curves. Altogether, sCentInDB will serve as a valuable resource for researchers working on plant volatiles and employing genetic engineering to enhance oil yield and composition. Further, sCentInDB will aid in establishment of quality standards for essential oils and provide vital insights for therapeutic and perfumery applications. sCentInDB is accessible at https://cb.imsc.res.in/scentindb/.