Abstract
Drug development using plant sources is an important and fast evolving area. Plants contain valuable phytochemicals that possess a wide variety of curative functions including antibacterial, antifungal, anti-carcinogenic, enzyme stimulating, and many more. The growing prevalence of chronic diseases and rising health care costs have renewed the interests of many researchers to collect, store and retrieve information on medically relevant phytochemicals. The renewed interest has opened the path for designing practical approaches to increase the biochemical productivity of medicinal plants using large-scale but low-cost solutions. However, the interactions between bioactive compounds from herbal-supplements and prescription drugs leading to serious clinical consequences has become a widespread safety concern. The key to achieving production goals as well as addressing safety concerns lie in our thorough understanding of secondary metabolism in plant. Hence, to elucidate the importance of phytochemicals, and to unveil the underlying metabolic mechanisms that could affect the nature and level of bioactive compounds in the herbs we consume, we have developed CuHerbDB-a graph based database, for efficient storage/retrieval and graphical presentation of botanical, biochemical and pharmacological data for culinary herbs, using a Neo4j database framework. This database is the first step towards integrating herbal data for pharmacogenomics, which can be currently used to identify and facilitate feasible drug production strategies using plant sources and to investigate ways to significantly enhance the quality of herbs, in an urban farm setting.