Chemogenomics knowledgebase and systems pharmacology for hallucinogen target identification—Salvinorin A as a case study

[Display omitted] •A comprehensive hallucinogenic-specific knowledgebase was established for research purpose. The knowledge and data for hallucinogens, their corresponding targets, and pathways had been collected to build a comprehensive database, which was also implemented with our in house computational tools for target identification and compound screening research.•Salvinorin A was predicted to act on not only kappa opioid receptor, but also muscarinic acetylcholine receptor, dopamine receptor, and cannabinoid receptors.•The pathological laughing side effect of salvinorin A, which haven’t been reported from other kappa opioid receptor agonists, could be blamed to its modulation on dopamine receptor 2 or muscarinic acetylcholine receptor 2. Drug abuse is a serious problem worldwide. Recently, hallucinogens have been reported as a potential preventative and auxiliary therapy for substance abuse. However, the use of hallucinogens as a drug abuse treatment has potential risks, as the fundamental mechanisms of hallucinogens are not clear. So far, no scientific database is available for the mechanism research of hallucinogens. We constructed a hallucinogen-specific chemogenomics database by collecting chemicals, protein targets and pathways closely related to hallucinogens. This information, together with our established computational chemogenomics tools, such as TargetHunter and HTDocking, provided a one-step solution for the mechanism study of hallucinogens. We chose salvinorin A, a potent hallucinogen extracted from the plant Salvia divinorum, as an example to demonstrate the usability of our platform. With the help of HTDocking program, we predicted four novel targets for salvinorin A, including muscarinic acetylcholine receptor 2, cannabinoid receptor 1, cannabinoid receptor 2 and dopamine receptor 2. We looked into the interactions between salvinorin A and the predicted targets. The binding modes, pose and docking scores indicate that salvinorin A may interact with some of these predicted targets. Overall, our database enriched the information of systems pharmacological analysis, target identification and drug discovery for hallucinogens.