MPDB 2.0: a large scale and integrated medicinal plant database of Bangladesh

Abstract

Objective: MPDB 2.0 is built to be the continuation of MPDB 1.0, to serve as a more comprehensive data repertoire for Bangladeshi medicinal plants, and to provide a user-friendly interface for researchers, health practitioners, drug developers, and students who wish to study the various medicinal & nutritive plants scattered around Bangladesh and the underlying phytochemicals contributing to their efficacy in Bangladeshi folk medicine.

Results: MPDB 2.0 database ( https://www.medicinalplantbd.com/ ) comprises a collection of more than five hundred Bangladeshi medicinal plants, alongside a record of their corresponding scientific, family, and local names together with their utilized parts, information regarding ailments, active compounds, and PubMed ID of related publications. While medicinal plants are not limited to the borders of any country, Bangladesh and its Southeast Asian neighbors do boast a huge collection of potent medicinal plants with considerable folk-medicinal history compared to most other countries in the world. Development of MPDB 2.0 has been highly focused upon human diseases, albeit many of the plants indexed here can serve in developing biofuel (e.g.: Jatropha curcas used in biofuel) or bioremediation technologies (e.g.: Amaranthus cruentus helps to reduce cadmium level in soil) or nutritive diets (Terminalia chebula can be used in nutritive diets) or cosmetics (Aloe vera used in cosmetics), etc.

Keywords: Folk medicine; MPDB2.0; Medicinal plant; Medicinal plant database of Bangladesh.

Fig. 1

Pie chart demonstrates the most prominent plant families, expressed as percentage, from the MPDB 2.0. Families contain 10 or more than 10 plants are represented here individually, and all other families were listed as “other” category. Details numbers are provided in the Table 1

Fig. 2

Involvement of medicinal plant databased such as MPDB1.0 and MPDB2.0 in drug discovery initiative

Fig. 3

A Interface of MPDB2.0 database. B Keyword search result demonstrates related plant, their scientific names, source of plant, utilized parts, ailment, available active compounds, source of article, and hyperlinked PubMed ID of the reference papers