Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2011 Jan 6;6(1):e15939.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015939.

TCM Database@Taiwan: the world's largest traditional Chinese medicine database for drug screening in silico

Calvin Yu-Chian Chen  1
Affiliations
Free PMC article

TCM Database@Taiwan: the world's largest traditional Chinese medicine database for drug screening in silico

Calvin Yu-Chian Chen. PLoS One. .
Free PMC article

Abstract

Rapid advancing computational technologies have greatly speeded up the development of computer-aided drug design (CADD). Recently, pharmaceutical companies have increasingly shifted their attentions toward traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for novel lead compounds. Despite the growing number of studies on TCM, there is no free 3D small molecular structure database of TCM available for virtual screening or molecular simulation. To address this shortcoming, we have constructed TCM Database@Taiwan (http://tcm.cmu.edu.tw/) based on information collected from Chinese medical texts and scientific publications. TCM Database@Taiwan is currently the world's largest non-commercial TCM database. This web-based database contains more than 20,000 pure compounds isolated from 453 TCM ingredients. Both cdx (2D) and Tripos mol2 (3D) formats of each pure compound in the database are available for download and virtual screening. The TCM database includes both simple and advanced web-based query options that can specify search clauses, such as molecular properties, substructures, TCM ingredients, and TCM classification, based on intended drug actions. The TCM database can be easily accessed by all researchers conducting CADD. Over the last eight years, numerous volunteers have devoted their time to analyze TCM ingredients from Chinese medical texts as well as to construct structure files for each isolated compound. We believe that TCM Database@Taiwan will be a milestone on the path towards modernizing traditional Chinese medicine.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Search flowchart and available download options in TCM database.
Figure 2
Figure 2. The search tool available in the TCM database.
(a) search by TCM category and (b) search by chemical composition.
Figure 3
Figure 3. The advance search interface.
Figure 4
Figure 4. The infrastructure of the TCM database.
The design is adapted from Norbert Haider's MolDB5R.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Fang YC, Huang HC, Chen HH, Juan HF. TCMGeneDIT: a database for associated traditional Chinese medicine, gene and disease information using text mining. BMC Complement Altern Med. 2008;8:58. - PMC - PubMed
    1. He M, Yan XJ, Zhou JJ, Xie GR. Traditional Chinese medicine database and application on the Web. J Chem Inf Comput Sci. 2001;41:273–277. - PubMed
    1. Qiao XB, Hou TJ, Zhang W, Guo SL, Xu SJ. A 3D structure database of components from Chinese traditional medicinal herbs. J Chem Inf Comput Sci. 2002;42:481–489. - PubMed
    1. Chen X, Zhou H, Liu YB, Wang JF, Li H, et al. Database of traditional Chinese medicine and its application to studies of mechanism and to prescription validation. Br J Pharmacol. 2006;149:1092–1103. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Irwin JJ, Shoichet BK. ZINC - A free database of commercially available compounds for virtual screening. J Chem Inf Model. 2005;45:177–182. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types