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HIT: linking herbal active ingredients to targets.
1State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai 200237, China.
Nucleic Acids Research
|November 25, 2010
Summary
A new database, Herb Ingredients' Targets (HIT), now provides comprehensive protein target information for herbal compounds. This resource aids drug discovery by detailing herbal ingredient interactions with protein targets, complementing existing drug databases.
Area of Science:
- Pharmacology and Cheminformatics
- Natural Products Drug Discovery
- Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Background:
- Existing protein target databases primarily focus on FDA-approved drugs and precursors.
- Valuable information on herbal active ingredients and their protein targets is scarce, hindering natural product drug discovery.
- There is a need for a curated resource linking herbal compounds to their molecular targets.
Purpose of the Study:
- To construct and present a comprehensive, curated database for Herb Ingredients' Targets (HIT).
- To bridge the gap in readily available information on herbal compounds and their associated protein targets.
- To facilitate mechanistic studies and subsequent research in drug discovery utilizing natural products.
Main Methods:
- Systematic curation of protein target information for herbal ingredients from over 3250 literature sources.
- Inclusion of direct/indirectly affected proteins, protein binders, and enzymes involved with herbal compounds.
- Annotation of gene regulation, experimental conditions, bioactivities, and references for each entry.
Main Results:
- The HIT database contains 5208 entries, detailing 1301 protein targets affected by 586 herbal compounds from over 1300 Chinese herbs.
- Includes 221 direct targets and overlaps with 280 targets from the Therapeutic Targets Database (TTD) and 445 from DrugBank.
- Provides crosslinks to numerous external databases including TTD, DrugBank, KEGG, PDB, and NCBI for comprehensive data integration.
Conclusions:
- The Herb Ingredients' Targets (HIT) database is a valuable, comprehensive resource for researchers in pharmacology and drug discovery.
- HIT enhances the study of herbal medicine by providing detailed molecular target information.
- The database supports the exploration of novel drug leads from natural products.
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