| Info. | Vol.2 - No.4 (2008.12.20) |
|---|---|
| Title | THINKherb: The Herb INformation Knowledge base - The Chip Content Database for Herbal Medicine |
| Authors | Banggul Oh1, ChanHwi Um2, MiKyung Lee1, Hyunsu Bae1, MooChang Hong1, MinKyu Shin1 & YangSeok Kim1,2 |
| Institutions | 1Department of Physiology, College of Oriental Medicine,
Kyung Hee University, #1 Hoeki-dong Dongdaemoon-gu,
Seoul 130-701, Korea 2Bioinformatics Unit, ISTECH Inc. No. 506, Woongshin Art Plaza, 847 Janghang2-dong, Ilsan-gu, Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do 411-837, Korea Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Y.S. Kim (yskim1158@khu.ac.kr) |
| 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, nowledge-based information. It is the first in herb information system to combine clinical herb data with molecular information. In addition, another characteristic of HINKherb is expansion of data to provide potential herb interaction information. The DB contains: 499 herbs, 1,238 genes (human. mouse. rat included), 825 diseases, 45 pharmacological activity, and 373 signaling pathways (Human 148.Mouse 121.Rat 04). Entire data were manually annotated by experts for accuracy. The database is vailable on website http://220.127.168.145:8888/ herb/. |
| Keyword | Database, Bioinformatics, Evidence based medicine, Medical informatics, Knowledge representation |
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