Plant Metabolite Databases: From Herbal Medicines to Modern Drug Discovery.

Herbal medicine is an inseparable part of the traditional medical science in many countries, especially Eastern ones, throughout the history. Nowadays, the popularity of using herbal medicines in daily life, as well as clinical practice, has gradually expanded to many Western countries with positive impacts and acceptance. The annual growth of the herbal medicine and natural product market has strongly inspired scientists to standardize and formulate herbal sources via present pharmaceutical criteria as modernization of traditional medicines. Based on the shared knowledge of traditional medicines using herbs, scientists take advantage of modern sciences (chemistry, biology, etc.) and powerful computing advances to develop many types of herbal metabolite databases with various focuses, such as network pharmacology and virtual screening. The recent rise of these databases has intensively supported modern drug discovery of the natural molecular framework. Although the number of known natural compounds source...