MEDDB: A medicinal plant database developed with the information gathered from tribal people in and around Madurai, Tamil Nadu

Tribal peoples are endowed with enriched traditional wisdom to use available nature resources around them. They are well versed in the usage of plant for treating various diseases. They have used powder or extract or paste form of the plant parts such as root, shoot, whole plant, fruits and leaves etc. The recipe known by the tribal people was passed on only to their family members and community through mouth to mouth practice. Hence, the knowledge is confined to particular people alone. It is always expedient to store information in the database, so that it will be accessible by everyone from everywhere. To achieve this, MEDDB has been developed, which stores the details of 110 plant species that are commonly used by tribes for fever, asthma, cold, cough, diabetes, diarrhea, dysentery, eye infections, stomach ache, wounds and snake bite. The details of each plant were collected from the literature and through web search to give comprehensive and exhaustive information. Each plant entry is compiled under the subheadings viz., common name, classification, physical characteristics, medicinal uses, active constituents, and references.


Background:
Traditional medicines are an invaluable resource for mankind. It is used to refer both traditional medicine system and various forms of indigenous medicine [1]. They followed their own health practices, believes, spiritual therapies and exercises. It is reported that over 6000 plants in India are in use of traditional medicine systems such as Ayurveda, Unanai, and Siddha [2]. Each tribe has explored the medicinal property of herbs in their area by observation and trial and error method.
India is rich in medicinal and aromatic plants and it is one of the twelve mega-biodiversity countries in the world and treasured with well practiced knowledge of traditional herbal medicine. It has been reported that 20,000 plants in India  Due to its accessibility, availability, low cost with less side effects and reliable therapeutic efficacy, traditional Indian medicine drew the attention of global market and many pharmaceutical companies in discovering natural bioactive compounds. Therefore, it is important to collect, document the traditional knowledge of tribal people on traditional medicine and conserving information on indigenous medicinal plants for exploiting as a novel bioactive compounds for treating infectious diseases. Digitalization of all this information is possible because of the development of database system. Antidiabetic plants used in ethno medicine is digitalized and made available in online. It consists of 238 plants with information like name of the plant, geographical distribution, and part of the plant investigated, dosage, active constituents with antidiabetic property with their structures, physical and chemical properties and its action [19]. In order to bring out the knowledge of traditional medicine to the modern world and to make it accessible from everywhere, MEDDB, a database of medicinal plants, was developed with the objective of exploring the ethnomedicine used by tribal people of Madurai, Tamil Nadu. The database has been developed based on the published data collected from tribal people in and around Madurai, Tamil Nadu.

Methodology: Data collection and database design
The study is based on secondary sources, which include books, thesis, papers in technical journals available from PubMed, Science Direct, and Biomed Central, newspapers and government reports. The database was developed using PHP/MySQL. The images of the plants are given in JPEG file format. The information on each species were collected and arranged in plant profile files which contain the detailed features like scientific name, vernacular name in Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi, Odissy in few cases, family name, classification, physical characteristics, medicinal uses, parts used and ethnomedicinal preparation, active constituents, references and the image of the plant. The references are hyperlinked.

Software and Hardware
Microsoft Windows 95/98/2000/2003/XP operating system was used in the development. PHP, HTML and java script used as front end. The database was developed using MySQL as back end. A High-end server-IBM 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon/Itanium/AMD Opetron was used for databases. Detailed information about the plants is being displayed in a separate web page containing common name, scientific name, family, classification, physical characteristics, medicinal uses, active constituents and references which is hyperlinked. The photograph of each plant is also displayed in the same page. In the disease search option, all the plants used for the particular disease will be displayed. Each one is hyperlinked with its plant profile file. The overall database design and the screen shot of home page are given in (Figure 1a & 1b) respectively.

Future development:
It will be further refined and updated periodically. The database will also be modified to include the structure of active constituents as .mol files which can be used for docking in the near future.