DCABM-TCM, a Database of Constituents Absorbed into Blood and Metabolites of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Abstract Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) not only maintains the health of peoples in Asia but also provides a great resource of active natural products for modern drug development. However, owing to its diverse constituents and the complex interactions with the human body, it is still challenging to clarify its effective constituents and molecular mechanism. This greatly hinders its widespread application worldwide and TCM-based modern drug development. The vast majority of constituents in TCM can produce pharmacological effects only after they are absorbed into bloodstream. Compared with ordinary constituents generally detected in vitro, these that are verified to reach the bloodstream, including original constituents absorbed into blood and metabolites of original constituents produced by the gastrointestinal tract, intestinal microflora, and liver, are more likely to be really effective ones responsible for the pharmacological effects. Here we developed DCABM-TCM (a Database of Constituents Absorbed into Blood and Metabolites of TCM), the first database systematically collecting blood constituents of TCM prescriptions and herbs, including prototypes and metabolites experimentally-detected in blood, together with the corresponding detailed detection conditions by manual literature mining. Currently DCABM-TCM has collected 4206 blood constituents of 192 prescriptions and 194 herbs, and also integrated various related annotations including physicochemical properties, ADMET properties, and associated targets, functional terms, pathways, and diseases etc. Furthermore, DCABM-TCM supported two analysis functions, the network pharmacology analysis for TCM molecular mechanism elucidation and the target/pathway/disease-based screening of candidate blood constituents, herbs or prescriptions for TCM-based drug discovery. DCABM-TCM is freely assessable by http://bionet.ncpsb.org.cn/dcabm-tcm/ and is browsable and searchable for each of 6 kinds of entities, including prescriptions, herbs, blood constituents, targets, pathways, and diseases. DCABM-TCM will contribute to not only the elucidation of effective constituents and molecular mechanism of TCMs but also the discovery of TCM-derived drug-like compounds which are both bioactive and bioavailable, the feature investigation of absorbable natural compounds, and the quality control of herbs.