Medicinal Plant Databases: Analyzing Strengths, Weaknesses and Innovations for Future Improvements

Abstract

Medicinal plants have played an important role in medicine due to their ability to bind and play cellular targets active in disease. Medicinal plants hold a variety of bioactive scaffolds for the treatment of many disorders. Medicinal plants have few harmful effects, affordability, and simple accessibility and their potential in traditional remedies. Identifying pharmacological targets from active components of medicinal plants has become a hot topic for biomedical research to generate innovative therapies. For organizing new scientific literature produced in the medicinal plant field, as well as new drug discoveries in the information era have become an important part of plant databases. This review article aimed at analyzing the currently available plant databases. PubMed and Google are used for searching for finding medicinal plant databases. PubMed was used for searching for papers presenting medicinal plant databases as a search strategy. Google was also used for searching medicinal plant databases. The current access to plant databases and the features, its URL, its strength, its weakness and the innovation of the plant databases were mentioned in this review article. The reviewed databases had a large group of information in terms of characteristics and innovation. Finally, some recommendations for the efficient improvement of plant databases were suggested. This review article may not cover all the required information, but can give readers key concepts, views, and suggestions for building many useful plant databases.