THINKherb: The Herb INformation Knowledge base - The chip content database for herbal medicine > 기타논문

Abstract

Motivation: Herbal products are widely used in the field of medicine. The effect of herb is well-known in the field of medicine1. It is applied widely from simple pain controls to many severe diseases. Yet, due to shortage of scientific evidence on molecular mechanism of herbs, it had remained as only an alternative choice to conventional drugs. With increase in clinical use, researchers are growing interest in scientific proof and molecular analysis of herbal effects, and the number of herb-related articles is increasing rapidly. In this information deluge, an efficient information system is essential. Although there are many herb databases, molecular information is more of an unexplored area. Therefore, we launched a novel scheme to construct an intelligent herb information system covering extensively from clinical applications to molecular mechanisms. The constructed database can be used for content generation of expression chip for the mechanism study of herbal medicine. Results: THINKherb is an innovative herb database to provide integrated, knowledge-based information. It is the first in herb information system to combine clinical herb data with molecular information. In addition, another characteristic of THINKherb is expansion of data to provide potential herb interaction information. The DB contains: 499 herbs, 1,238 genes (human. mouse. rat included), 825 diseases, 245 pharmacological activity, and 373 signaling pathways (Human 148.Mouse 121.Rat 104). Entire data were manually annotated by experts for accuracy. The database is available on website http://220.127.168.145:8888/herb/.