YaTCM: Yet another Traditional Chinese Medicine Database for Drug Discovery

Baiqing Li; Chunfeng Ma; Xiaoyong Zhao; Zhigang Hu; Tengfei Du; Xuanming Xu; Zhonghua Wang; Jianping Lin

doi:10.1016/j.csbj.2018.11.002

YaTCM: Yet another Traditional Chinese Medicine Database for Drug Discovery

Comput Struct Biotechnol J. 2018 Nov 23:16:600-610. doi: 10.1016/j.csbj.2018.11.002. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Baiqing Li¹, Chunfeng Ma^{1

2}, Xiaoyong Zhao¹, Zhigang Hu¹, Tengfei Du¹, Xuanming Xu¹, Zhonghua Wang³, Jianping Lin^{1

3

2}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, College of Pharmacy and Tianjin Key Laboratory of Molecular Drug Research, Nankai University, Haihe Education Park, 38 Tongyan Road, Tianjin 300353, China.
² Platform of Pharmaceutical Intelligence, Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biomedicine, Tianjin 300457, China.
³ Biodesign Center, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 32 West 7th Avenue, Tianjin Airport Economic Area, Tianjin 300308, China.

Abstract

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has a long history of widespread clinical applications, especially in East Asia, and is becoming frequently used in Western countries. However, owing to extreme complicacy in both chemical ingredients and mechanism of action, a deep understanding of TCM is still difficult. To accelerate the modernization and popularization of TCM, a single comprehensive database is required, containing a wealth of TCM-related information and equipped with complete analytical tools. Here we present YaTCM (Yet another Traditional Chinese Medicine database), a free web-based toolkit, which provides comprehensive TCM information and is furnished with analysis tools. YaTCM allows a user to (1) identify the potential ingredients that are crucial to TCM herbs through similarity search and substructure search, (2) investigate the mechanism of action for TCM or prescription through pathway analysis and network pharmacology analysis, (3) predict potential targets for TCM molecules by multi-voting chemical similarity ensemble approach, and (4) explore functionally similar herb pairs. All these functions can lead to one systematic network for visualization of TCM recipes, herbs, ingredients, definite or putative protein targets, pathways, and diseases. This web service would help in uncovering the mechanism of action of TCM, revealing the essence of TCM theory and then promoting the drug discovery process. YaTCM is freely available at http://cadd.pharmacy.nankai.edu.cn/yatcm/home.

Keywords: AM, Astragalus Membranaceus.; Drug discovery; HHN, Herb-herb network.; MV-SEA, Multi-voting similarity ensemble approach.; Pathway analysis; RA, Atractylodes Macrocephala.; SD, Saposhnikovia Divaricata.; Systems pharmacology; TCM; TCM, Traditional Chinese medicine..