TCMID 2.0: a comprehensive resource for TCM

Abstract

As a traditional medical intervention in Asia and a complementary and alternative medicine in western countries, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is capturing worldwide attention in life science field. Traditional Chinese Medicine Integrated Database (TCMID), which was originally launched in 2013, was a comprehensive database aiming at TCM's modernization and standardization. It has been highly recognized among pharmacologists and scholars in TCM researches. The latest release, TCMID 2.0 (http://www.megabionet.org/tcmid/), replenished the preceding database with 18 203 herbal ingredients, 15 prescriptions, 82 related targets, 1356 drugs, 842 diseases and numerous new connections between them. Considering that chemical changes might take place in decocting process of prescriptions, which may result in new ingredients, new data containing the prescription ingredients was collected in current version. In addition, 778 herbal mass spectrometry (MS) spectra related to 170 herbs were appended to show the variation of herbal quality in different origin and distinguish genuine medicinal materials from common ones while 3895 MS spectra of 729 ingredients were added as the supplementary materials of component identification. With the significant increase of data, TCMID 2.0 will further facilitate TCM's modernization and enhance the exploration of underlying biological processes that are response to the diverse pharmacologic actions of TCM.

Figure 1.

Data display and structure of TCMID 2.0. (A) An herbal ingredient-target network as an illustration for the new visualizations of networks. The red triangle stands for the ingredient used for query; the blue circle stands for targets of ingredients; the green triangle stands for the herbal targets related drugs; the yellow square stands for the herbal targets related diseases. Information text of nodes is reachable when users drag the mouse over one node and the colour of the node will turn to purple. Direct interaction information related to the query node can be viewed through the link in the right tooltip. (B) An illustration of internal connections among each data piece.