A Drug-Target Network-Based Approach to Evaluate the Efficacy of Medicinal Plants for Type II Diabetes Mellitus

The use of plants as natural medicines in the treatment of type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has long been of special interest. In this work, we developed a docking score-weighted prediction model based on drug-target network to evaluate the efficacy of medicinal plants for T2DM. High throughput virtual screening from chemical library of natural products was adopted to calculate the binding affinity between natural products contained in medicinal plants and 33 T2DM-related proteins. The drug-target network was constructed according to the strength of the binding affinity if the molecular docking score satisfied the threshold. By linking the medicinal plant with T2DM through drug-target network, the model can predict the efficacy of natural products and medicinal plant for T2DM. Eighteen thousand nine hundred ninety-nine natural products and 1669 medicinal plants were predicted to be potentially bioactive.