Uttarakhand Medicinal Plants Database (UMPDB): A Platform for Exploring Genomic, Chemical, and Traditional Knowledge

Medicinal plants are the main natural pools for the primary health care system, ethno-medicine, as well as traditional Indian system of several medicines. Uttarakhand also known as 'Herbal State', is a rich source of medicinal plants and traditional medicinal knowledge. A great deal of information about medicinal plants of Uttarakhand is scattered in different forms. Although many medicinal plant databases are available, currently there is no cohesive manually curated database of medicinal plants widely distributed in Uttarakhand state. A comprehensive database has been developed, known as the Uttarakhand Medicinal Plants Database (UMPDB). UMPDB provides extensive information on botanical name, common name, taxonomy, genomic taxonomy id, habit, habitat, location in Uttarakhand, part use, medicinal use, genomic information (including number of nucleotides, proteins, ESTs), chemical information, and scientific literature. Annotated medicinal plants integrated in the current version of the database were collected from the existing books, databases, and available literature. The current version of UMPDB contains the 1127 records of medicinal plants which belong to 153 plant families distributed across 13 districts of Uttarakhand. The primary goal of developing this database is to provide traditional, genomic, and chemical descriptions of the medicinal plants exclusively found in various regions of Uttarakhand. We anticipate that embedded information in the database would help users to readily obtain desired information.