VIETHERB: A Database for Vietnamese Herbal Species

Abstract

Vietnam carries a highly diverse practice of traditional medicine in which various combinations of herbs have been widely used as remedies for many types of diseases. Poor hand-written records and current text-based databases, however, perplex the process of conventionalizing and evaluating canonical therapeutic effects. In efforts to reorganize the valuable information, we provide the VIETHERB database (http://vietherb.com.vn/) for herbs documented in Vietnamese traditional medicines. This database is constructed with confidence to provide users with information on herbs and other side information including metabolites, diseases, morphologies, and geographical locations for each individual species. Our data in this release consist of 2,881 species, 10,887 metabolites, 458 geographical locations, and 8,046 therapeutic effects. The numbers of species− metabolite, species−therapeutic effect, species−morphology, and species−distribution binary relationships are 17,602, 2,718, 11,943, and 16,089, respectively. The information on Vietnamese herbal species can be easily accessed or queried using their scientific names. Searching for species sharing side information can be simply done by clicking on the data. The database primarily serves as an open source facilitating users in studies of modernizing traditional medicine, computer-aided drug design, conservation of endangered plants, and other relevant experimental sciences.

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

“…Unfortunately, none of them is accessible anymore. VIETHERB [154] is a database published in 2018 with the aim of providing high-quality and literature-based data on herbs and active compounds from them. Despite the novelty of the database, it is not accessible anymore.…”

“…Nowadays, publishing a dataset or a database is a relatively easy publication and have the potential to generate a high number of citations. However, this trend generates a plethora of databases that are unmaintained beyond the publication time (like it is the case of VIET-HERB [154] for example, published only 1 year prior to the writing of the present review and already not accessible anymore), despite the journals requirements to provide accessibility to the published datasets and databases for a number of years ahead.…”

On the Redundancy of Natural Products Public Databases and Where to Find Data in 2020 - A Review on Natural Products Databases

“…Unfortunately, none of them is accessible anymore. VIETHERB [149] is a database published in 2018 with the aim of providing high-quality and literature-based data on herbs and active compounds from them. Despite the novelty of the database, it is not accessible anymore.…”

“…Nowadays, publishing a dataset or a database is a relatively easy publication and have the potential to generate a high number of citations. However, this trend generates a plethora of databases that are unmaintained beyond the publication time (like it is the case of VIETHERB [149] for example, published only one year prior to the writing of the present review and already not accessible anymore), despite the journals requirements to provide accessibility to the published datasets and databases for a number of years ahead.…”

<strong></strong>LANaPD: Towards a Unified Latin America Natural Products Database

“…Examples are AfroDd, from Africa [23] and VIETHERB from Vietnam [24]. As part of Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 2 April 2020 doi:10.20944/preprints202004.0012.v1 such global efforts, different Latin America countries are building their own compound databases using chemoinformatics resources [25],.…”