TM-MC: a database of medicinal materials and chemical compounds in Northeast Asian traditional medicine

Abstract

Background: In traditional medicine, there has been a great deal of research on the effects exhibited by medicinal materials. To study the effects, resources that can systematically describe the chemical compounds in medicinal materials are necessary. In recent years, numerous databases on medicinal materials and constituent compounds have been constructed. However, because these databases provide differing information and the sources of such information are unclear or difficult to verify, it is difficult to decide which database to use. Moreover, there is much overlapping information. The aim of this study was to construct a database of medicinal materials and chemical compounds in Northeast Asian traditional medicine (TM-MC), for which medicinal materials are listed in the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese pharmacopoeias and information on the compound names of medicinal materials can easily be confirmed online.

Description: To provide information on the chemical compounds of medicinal materials, chromatography articles from MEDLINE and PubMed Central were searched. After chemical compounds of medicinal materials were extracted by manually investigating the full-text of articles, a database of information on about 14,000 compounds from 536 medicinal materials was built. The database also provides links to the articles from which each medicinal material and chemical compound were extracted.

Conclusion: TM-MC database provides information on medicinal materials and their chemical compounds from chromatography articles in MEDLINE and PubMed Central. Researchers can easily check relevant information through the links to articles.

Fig. 1

Process for constructing the TM-MC database

Fig. 2

Result of search for the keyword “Ephedrae Herba”

Fig. 3

Result of search for the keyword “ginsenoside Rg1”

Fig. 4

Example of a RDF graph for the Ephedra Herb in the ontology