TCM-associated target prediction

Three databases are combined to predict relevant targets of active ingredients in CC and NI comprehensively. GeneCards database (http://www.genecards.org/) automatically integrates gene-centric data from ~125 web sources, while BATMAN-TCM (http://bionet.ncpsb.org/batman-tcm) ranks potential drug–target interactions based on their similarity to the known drug–target interactions. STITCH database (http://stitch.embl.de/) integrates many sources of experimental and manually curated evidence with text-mining information and interaction predictions. First, the active constituents were severally entered into GeneCards, BATMAN-TCM and STITCH. Then, duplications and unified names were removed from the targets obtained from the aforementioned three tools. Noteworthy, only the targets of Homo sapiens were kept for further study.