An exhaustive Data Mining of Medicinal Plants using MySQL for Biotechnology Research

Abstract

Vital pieces of information related to medicinal plants are exhaustive but scattered. A plant database centering on the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) responsible for therapeutic value of plants is not available in the literature. So it is prudent to make a curated database comprising of information on APIs viz. name of plants with taxonomical hierarchy, Useful parts of the plants, name of generic drugs and recent findings of their therapeutic use. The current project aims to assemble a vast array of information on medicinal plants from different sources and to perform a systematic data mining for simple and effective retrieval for end user. Briefly, the methods used for implementing the database was 1)Extracting information from standard books, journals, existing databases, from databases of abstracts and from Gray literature, 2)Storing the information in Related Database Management System (RDBMS) like MySQL server and 3) Retrieving the information through an interactive webpage using web scripting language PHP. The Database resulted in providing plant related information through two ways. One is drop down menu of APIs and another is through a search box introduced in the webpage. After successful implementation of the methodologies it was concluded that the database could fulfill its purpose of providing unique and organized information of essentiality to the scientific fraternity with proper references. In future this database can be scaled up with more plant related information and more APIs.