Internet nutrition tool

Sigma-Aldrich has enhanced its Bioactive Nutrient Explorer. This internet-based tool has been specifically designed to help nutrition and animal scientists, medical researchers, biologists and analytical chemists studying dietary plants and supplements locate the chemicals and kits they need to support their work.

The improved Bioactive Nutrient Explorer (http://sigma-aldrich.com/nutrition) now includes a searchable database of over 500 plants shown in the scientific literature to have physiological activities in key areas of research, such as cancer, diabetes, metabolism and other disease or normal states.

The enhanced Bioactive Nutrient Explorer is designed to allow searches for compounds having a similar chemical structure of interest, eg, flavonoids, or for plants containing a specific compound.

Constructed using Adobe Macromedia Flash software, the Bioactive Nutrient Explorer contains ~5000 products representing ~1400 chemicals, identifies the compounds found in a specific plant, and arranges them by chemical family and class.

To make the information matrix more robust, Dr Libby Yunger of Sigma-Aldrich, developer of the Bioactive Nutrient Explorer, reviewed multiple scientific sources for documented physiological actions of herbs that were associated with disease intervention or prevention.