In-silico studies in Chinese herbal medicines' research: Evaluation of in-silico methodologies and phytochemical data sources, and a review of research to date

The available databases that catalogue information on traditional Chinese medicines are reviewed in terms of their content and utility for in-silica research on Chinese herbal medicines, as too are the various protein database resources, and the software available for use in such studies. The software available for bioinformatics and 'omics studies of Chinese herbal medicines are summarised, and a critical evaluation given of the various in-silico methods applied in screening Chinese herbal medicines, including classification trees, neural networks, support vector machines, docking and inverse docking algorithms. Recommendations are made regarding any future in-silico studies of Chinese herbal medicines. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.