Abstract
BackgroundThousands of plants and animals possess pharmacological properties and there is an increased interest in using these materials for therapy and health maintenance. Efficacies of the application is critically dependent on the use of genuine materials. For time to time, life-threatening poisoning is found because toxic adulterant or substitute is administered. DNA barcoding provides a definitive means of authentication and for conducting molecular systematics studies. Owing to the reduced cost in DNA authentication, the volume of the DNA barcodes produced for medicinal materials is on the rise and necessitates the development of an integrated DNA database.DescriptionWe have developed an integrated DNA barcode multimedia information platform- Medicinal Materials DNA Barcode Database (MMDBD) for data retrieval and similarity search. MMDBD contains over 1000 species of medicinal materials listed in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia and American Herbal Pharmacopoeia. MMDBD also contains useful information of the medicinal material, including resources, adulterant information, medical parts, photographs, primers used for obtaining the barcodes and key references. MMDBD can be accessed at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/icm/mmdbd.htm.ConclusionsThis work provides a centralized medicinal materials DNA barcode database and bioinformatics tools for data storage, analysis and exchange for promoting the identification of medicinal materials. MMDBD has the largest collection of DNA barcodes of medicinal materials and is a useful resource for researchers in conservation, systematic study, forensic and herbal industry.
Highlights
Thousands of plants and animals possess pharmacological properties and there is an increased interest in using these materials for therapy and health maintenance
Medicinal Materials DNA Barcode Database (MMDBD) has the largest collection of DNA barcodes of medicinal materials and is a useful resource for researchers in conservation, systematic study, forensic and herbal industry
Herbal medicine is a useful source of bioactive compounds, such as oils obtained from the evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) for treating atopic dermatitis [2], and hyperforin extracted from St
Summary
The MMDBD is initiated to support the DNA barcoding initiative, which includes numerous important medicinal materials. MMDBD contains DNA barcode sequences, basic information and references of the medicinal materials. The integrated database provides users with easy access and retrieval of the data and web tools for sequence comparison. MMDBD will play a timely and important role for the authentication and quality control of medicinal materials and benefit the herbal industry. Availability and requirements The MMDBD is publicly available and can be accessed at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/icm/mmdbd.htm. Authors' contributions SKL performed web interface design, rational-relationship database construction and manuscript writing. KLW wrote the XSLT for converting eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data, collected and input data into the database and wrote the manuscript. ML collected and input the data into the database. All authors read and approved the final manuscript
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