ETM-DB: integrated Ethiopian traditional herbal medicine and phytochemicals database

Abstract

Background Recently, there has been an increasing tendency to go back to nature in search of new medicines. To facilitate this, a great deal of effort has been made to compile information on natural products worldwide, and as a result, many ethnic-based traditional medicine databases have been developed. In Ethiopia, there are more than 80 ethnic groups, each having their indigenous knowledge on the use of traditional medicine. About 80% of the population uses traditional medicine for primary health care. Despite this, there is no structured online database for Ethiopian traditional medicine, which limits natural products based drug discovery researches using natural products from this country. Description To develop ETM-DB, online research articles, theses, books, and public databases containing Ethiopian herbal medicine and phytochemicals information were searched. These resources were thoroughly inspected and the necessary data were extracted. Then, we developed a comprehensive online relational database which contains information on 1054 Ethiopian medicinal herbs with 1465 traditional therapeutic uses, 573 multi-herb prescriptions, 4285 compounds, 11,621 human target gene/proteins, covering 5779 herb-phenotype, 1879 prescription-herb, 16,426 herb-compound, 105,202 compound-phenotype, 162,632 compound-gene/protein, and 16,584 phenotype-gene/protein relationships. Using various cheminformatics tools, we obtained predicted physicochemical and absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) properties of ETM-DB compounds. We also evaluated drug-likeness properties of these compounds using FAF-Drugs4 webserver. From the 4285 compounds, 4080 of them passed the FAF-Drugs4 input data curation stage, of which 876 were found to have acceptable drug-likeness properties. Conclusion ETM-DB is the largest, freely accessible, web-based integrated resource on Ethiopian traditional medicine. It provides traditional herbal medicine entities and their relationships in well-structured forms including reference to the sources. The ETM-DB website interface allows users to search the entities using various options provided by the search menu. We hope that our database will expedite drug discovery and development researches from Ethiopian natural products as it contains information on the chemical composition and related human target gene/proteins. The current version of ETM-DB is openly accessible at http://biosoft.kaist.ac.kr/etm .

COCONUT online: Collection of Open Natural Products database

“…AfroCancer 365 [33] AfroDB 874 [34] AfroMalariaDB 252 [35] AnalytiCon Discovery NPs 4908 [36] BIOFACQUIM 400 [37] BitterDB 625 [38] Carotenoids Database 986 [39] ChEBI NPs 14603 [20] ChEMBL NPs 1585 [21] ChemSpider NPs 9027 [40] CMAUP (cCollective molecular activities of useful plants) 20868 [7] ConMedNP 2504 [41] ETM (Ethiopian Traditional Medicine) DB 1633 [42] Exposome-explorer 478 [43] FooDB 22123 [9] GNPS (Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking) 6740 [44] HIM (Herbal Ingredients in-vivo Metabolism database) 962 [45] HIT (Herbal Ingredients Targets) 470 [46] Indofine Chemical Company 46 [47] InflamNat 536 [48] InPACdb 122 [49] InterBioScreen Ltd 67291 [50] KNApSaCK 44422 [6] Lichen Database 1453 [51] Marine Natural Products 11880 [52] Mitishamba database 1010 [53] NANPDB (Natural Products from Northern African Sources) 3914 [54] NCI DTP data 404 [55] NPACT 1453 [56] NPASS 27424 [57] NPAtlas 23914 [4] NPCARE 1362 [58] NPEdia 16166 [59] NuBBEDB 2022 [5] p-ANAPL 467 [60] Phenol-explorer 681 [61] PubChem NPs 2828 [27] ReSpect 699 [62] SANCDB 592 [63] Seaweed Metabolite Database (SWMD) 348 [64] Specs Natural Products 745…”

Review on natural products databases: where to find data in 2020

“…Three datasets, AfroCancer [112], AfroMalariaDB [113] and Afrotryp [114], available as supplementary information of their respective publications link NPs from plants used in traditional medicines to their potential targets involved in the treatment of cancer, malaria and Trypanosoma. There are then country-specific and relatively small databases for NPs extracted from ATM plants, such as the Cameroon Medicinal Natural Products database (CamMedNP) [115], Central African Medicinal Plants database (ConMedNP) [116] and the Ethiopian Traditional Medicine Database (ETM-DB) [117].…”

SANCDB: an update on South African natural compounds and their readily available analogs

“…Comparatively, SANCDB has a similar distribution to other compound databases. The Integrated Ethiopian Traditional Herbal Medicine and Phytochemicals Database (ETM-DB) [ 79 ] compounds classification was also done using ClassyFire, and shares the same top three superclasses. ETM-DB with 3930 compounds has 22 superclasses and 200 classes.…”