TM-MC 2.0: an enhanced chemical database of medicinal materials in Northeast Asian traditional medicine

Abstract

Background: As chromatographic techniques have advanced, many articles that analyze the constituting compounds of medicinal materials have been published in relation to Northeast Asian traditional medicine, including traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). TM-MC was launched in 2015, providing information about the chemical compounds in medicinal materials from chromatographic articles in PubMed. Since 2015, through continuous curation efforts, we have now released TM-MC 2.0 with significant improvements to the quantity and quality of the data ( https://tm-mc.kr ).

Description: TM-MC 2.0 contains 635 medicinal materials, 34,107 chemical compounds (21,306 identified and de-duplicated), 13,992 targets, 27,997 diseases, and 5,075 prescriptions (2,393 de-duplicated by name). The database provides the largest number of identified compounds for medicinal materials listed in the pharmacopoeia compared to all TCM databases. In particular, marker compounds of medicinal materials and many newly discovered compounds were added through the manual curation of recent chromatographic articles.

Conclusion: TM-MC 2.0 provides the largest collection of information about the chemical compounds of the medicinal materials listed in the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese pharmacopoeias. Our database can be utilized for network pharmacology in traditional medicine and for the compound screening of medicinal materials for modern drug discovery.

Keywords: Chemical compound; Chromatography article; Medicinal material; Northeast Asian traditional medicine.

Fig. 1

Data structures (A) and a use case (B) in TM-MC 2.0

Fig. 2

Comparisons of the number of compounds with the same InChIKeys or compound names in TM-MC 2.0, TCMSP 2.3, and TCMID 2.0. Blue, green, and orange denote TM-MC, TCMSP, and TCMID, respectively. The difference in the number of overlapping compounds present between two or three databases is due to the fact that the comparison was done using only the first 14 characters of InChIKey