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Abstract：
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been used for thousands of years to treat human diseases. Recently, many databases have been devoted to studying TCM pharmacology. Most of these databases include information about the active ingredients of TCM herbs and their disease indications. These databases enable researchers to interrogate the mechanisms of action of TCM systematically. However, there is a need for comparative studies of these databases, as they are derived from various resources with different data processing methods. In this review, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing TCM databases. We found that the information complements each other by comparing herbs, ingredients, and herb-ingredient pairs in these databases. Therefore, data harmonization is vital to use all the available information fully. Moreover, different TCM databases may contain various annotation types for herbs or ingredients, notably for the chemical structure of ingredients, making it challenging to integrate data from them. We also highlight the latest TCM databases on symptoms or gene expressions, suggesting that using multi-omics data and advanced bioinformatics approaches may provide new insights for drug discovery in TCM. In summary, such a comparative study would help improve the understanding of data complexity that may ultimately motivate more efficient and more standardized strategies towards the digitalization of TCM.
摘要：
传统中药（TCM）已被用于治疗人类疾病已有数千年的历史。最近,许多数据库致力于研究中医药理学。这些数据库中大多数都包含有关中药有效成分及其疾病适应症的信息。这些数据库使研究人员能够系统地询问中医的作用机制。然而,需要对这些数据库进行比较研究，因为它们来自具有不同数据处理方法的各种资源。在这次审查中,我们提供了现有中医数据库的综合分析。我们通过比较草药发现这些信息是相辅相成的，成分,和这些数据库中的草药成分对。因此,数据协调对于充分利用所有可用信息至关重要。此外，不同的TCM数据库可能包含草药或成分的各种注释类型，特别是成分的化学结构，这使得整合来自它们的数据变得具有挑战性。我们还重点介绍了有关症状或基因表达的最新中医数据库，这表明，使用多组学数据和先进的生物信息学方法可能为中医药物发现提供新的见解。总之,这样的比较研究将有助于提高对数据复杂性的理解，这可能最终激发更有效和更标准化的中医数字化策略。
