Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 34141, South Korea.
Bio-Synergy Research Center, Daejeon, 34141, South Korea.
BMC Complement Altern Med. 2019 Aug 14;19(1):212. doi: 10.1186/s12906-019-2634-1.
Recently, there has been an increasing tendency to go back to nature in search of new medicines. To facilitate this, a great deal of effort has been made to compile information on natural products worldwide, and as a result, many ethnic-based traditional medicine databases have been developed. In Ethiopia, there are more than 80 ethnic groups, each having their indigenous knowledge on the use of traditional medicine. About 80% of the population uses traditional medicine for primary health care. Despite this, there is no structured online database for Ethiopian traditional medicine, which limits natural products based drug discovery researches using natural products from this country.
To develop ETM-DB, online research articles, theses, books, and public databases containing Ethiopian herbal medicine and phytochemicals information were searched. These resources were thoroughly inspected and the necessary data were extracted. Then, we developed a comprehensive online relational database which contains information on 1054 Ethiopian medicinal herbs with 1465 traditional therapeutic uses, 573 multi-herb prescriptions, 4285 compounds, 11,621 human target gene/proteins, covering 5779 herb-phenotype, 1879 prescription-herb, 16,426 herb-compound, 105,202 compound-phenotype, 162,632 compound-gene/protein, and 16,584 phenotype-gene/protein relationships. Using various cheminformatics tools, we obtained predicted physicochemical and absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) properties of ETM-DB compounds. We also evaluated drug-likeness properties of these compounds using FAF-Drugs4 webserver. From the 4285 compounds, 4080 of them passed the FAF-Drugs4 input data curation stage, of which 876 were found to have acceptable drug-likeness properties.
ETM-DB is the largest, freely accessible, web-based integrated resource on Ethiopian traditional medicine. It provides traditional herbal medicine entities and their relationships in well-structured forms including reference to the sources. The ETM-DB website interface allows users to search the entities using various options provided by the search menu. We hope that our database will expedite drug discovery and development researches from Ethiopian natural products as it contains information on the chemical composition and related human target gene/proteins. The current version of ETM-DB is openly accessible at http://biosoft.kaist.ac.kr/etm .
最近，人们越来越倾向于回归自然，寻找新药。为此，人们投入了大量精力来编译世界各地的天然产物信息，因此，许多基于民族的传统医学数据库得以开发。在埃塞俄比亚，有 80 多个民族，每个民族都有自己使用传统医学的本土知识。大约 80%的人口使用传统医学进行初级保健。尽管如此，埃塞俄比亚传统医学还没有一个结构化的在线数据库，这限制了利用该国天然产物进行基于天然产物的药物发现研究。
为了开发 ETM-DB，在线研究文章、论文、书籍和公共数据库中搜索了包含埃塞俄比亚草药和植物化学物质信息的内容。这些资源经过了彻底的检查，并提取了必要的数据。然后，我们开发了一个综合的在线关系数据库，其中包含了 1054 种埃塞俄比亚药用植物的信息，这些植物有 1465 种传统治疗用途，573 种多草药处方，4285 种化合物，11621 个人类靶基因/蛋白，涵盖了 5779 种草药-表型、1879 种处方-草药、16426 种草药-化合物、105202 种化合物-表型、162632 种化合物-基因/蛋白和 16584 种表型-基因/蛋白关系。我们使用各种化学信息学工具，预测了 ETM-DB 化合物的物理化学和吸收、分布、代谢、排泄和毒性（ADMET）特性。我们还使用 FAF-Drugs4 网络服务器评估了这些化合物的类药性。在 4285 种化合物中，有 4080 种通过了 FAF-Drugs4 输入数据管理阶段，其中 876 种被发现具有可接受的类药性。
ETM-DB 是最大的、免费获取的、基于网络的埃塞俄比亚传统医学综合资源。它以结构良好的形式提供传统草药实体及其关系，包括对来源的参考。ETM-DB 网站界面允许用户使用搜索菜单提供的各种选项搜索实体。我们希望我们的数据库能够加速从埃塞俄比亚天然产物中发现和开发药物的研究，因为它包含了有关化学成分和相关人类靶基因/蛋白的信息。ETM-DB 的当前版本可在 http://biosoft.kaist.ac.kr/etm 上公开获取。
