A WEB DEPOSITORY OF HERBAL DATA

a vision to synergize the efforts of scientific data seekers and providers

There has been a veritable explosion of scientific data about medicinal plants getting published in recent years. This is on top of the tremendous amounts of information about plants that has already been scattered about among a dozen disciplines (pharmacology, botany, anthropology, nutrition, organic chemistry, agriculture, etc). The information is so scattered about as to make it difficult to retrieve. This is something like the situation protein and gene chemists faced a couple decades ago and they have benefited greatly from the PDB and Genebank data depositories that were established then. The field of herbal phytopharmacognosy can likewise benefit by establishing a web depository database of data.

Everyone benefits!

using common formats for chemical structures, common data fields for biological effects, identifying each submitter and the journal reference the data was published in, benefits everyone:

clinicians worried about herb-drug interactions

research chemists seeking new compounds

consumers trying to figure out the truth from marketing.