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. 2019 Jan 8;47(D1):D976-D982.
doi: 10.1093/nar/gky987.

ETCM: an encyclopaedia of traditional Chinese medicine

Hai-Yu Xu  1   2 , Yan-Qiong Zhang  1 , Zhen-Ming Liu  3 , Tong Chen  2 , Chuan-Yu Lv  3 , Shi-Huan Tang  1 , Xiao-Bo Zhang  2 , Wei Zhang  1 , Zhi-Yong Li  4 , Rong-Rong Zhou  4 , Hong-Jun Yang  1 , Xiu-Jie Wang  5 , Lu-Qi Huang  2
Affiliations

ETCM: an encyclopaedia of traditional Chinese medicine

Hai-Yu Xu et al. Nucleic Acids Res. .

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is not only an effective solution for primary health care, but also a great resource for drug innovation and discovery. To meet the increasing needs for TCM-related data resources, we developed ETCM, an Encyclopedia of Traditional Chinese Medicine. ETCM includes comprehensive and standardized information for the commonly used herbs and formulas of TCM, as well as their ingredients. The herb basic property and quality control standard, formula composition, ingredient drug-likeness, as well as many other information provided by ETCM can serve as a convenient resource for users to obtain thorough information about a herb or a formula. To facilitate functional and mechanistic studies of TCM, ETCM provides predicted target genes of TCM ingredients, herbs, and formulas, according to the chemical fingerprint similarity between TCM ingredients and known drugs. A systematic analysis function is also developed in ETCM, which allows users to explore the relationships or build networks among TCM herbs, formulas,ingredients, gene targets, and related pathways or diseases. ETCM is freely accessible at http://www.nrc.ac.cn:9090/ETCM/. We expect ETCM to develop into a major data warehouse for TCM and to promote TCM related researches and drug development in the future.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The schema and objectives of ETCM. Boxes with yellow highlights refer to the novel information and functions in ETCM compared with other available TCM-related data resources.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Major function illustration of ETCM. (A) Function summary of ETCM. (B) Summary of herbs included in ETCM. Clicking on any proportion of the pie charts will bring out corresponding herbs in the below list. (C) The picture and habitat map of herb DA HUANG. (D) Quality control standard of herb DA HUANG. (E) Enrichment and list of GO terms of the putative target genes of herb DA HUANG. (F) Pathways enriched by the putative target genes of herb DA HUANG.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Examples of various networks constructed by the systematic analysis function of ETCM.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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