Background:
The North-Eastern region in general, Manipur and Nagaland in particular are genetic treasure house of plant, animal and microbial resources. They are considered to be the one of the 12 mega biodiversity rich zones of the world and forms a distinctive part of the Indo-Burma Hotspot that ranks 8th among the 34 biodiversity Hotspots of the world. Therefore, screening of medicinal plant extract for their biological activities from this diverse biodiversity region may provide an alternative and effective solution for the treatment of many diseases. So far, the documented information about the medicinal plant is very limited for North-East India. A very few of the tribal medicines have been included in the organized systems of medicine, however, a greater number of folk medicines have remained confined to certain tribal pockets in North-Eastern part of India alone. This knowledge, mostly unexplored in the scientific and medical literature, could be a very useful resource for the discovery of drug compounds for many ailments. As the drug is based on natural products, the effect of toxicity would be minimized to a larger extent.
Towards this purpose, we are building an integrated resource called NeMedPlant . It comprises of a database of natural products that are extracted from medicinal plants in North-Eastern regions. Using chemoinformatics approaches, active compounds will be identified by using 3D-QSAR models for the corresponding disease for which the plant is being used. A database will be made from the resultant lead molecules and from already reported compounds. The NeMedPlant would be an ideal resource for large scale prediction of activities of either synthetic or natural products.

Objectives:
• To develop an integrated package for large scale activity predictions of natural products
• To develop a database of structure and properties of natural products from North-Eastern region
• To develop a database of 3D-QSAR models of various protein targets derived from various peer reviewed literatures
• To develop a chemoinformatics based method for activity predictions
• To validate the method for some of the compounds for antibacterial and antiviral diseases.

Importance:
There is a need to document the indigenous knowledge related to the medicinal plants from India and convert it into easily accessible database. Our project also aims to explore richness of NE region, gather traditional information to discover and design the novel drugs candidates for antibacterial and antiviral diseases. Initial data collection of medicinal plants would be from Nagaland and Manipur regions. NeMedPlant would be an integrated resource containing lead compounds and chemoinformatics data. It would be useful for large scale prediction of activities of natural product and identifying drug leads having low toxicity and high bioavailability. The NeMedPlant can also be used for activity prediction of natural as well as synthetic product.