title: HIM-herbal ingredients in-vivo metabolism database.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Herbal medicine has long been viewed as a valuable asset for potential new drug discovery and herbal ingredients' metabolites, especially the in vivo metabolites were often found to gain better pharmacological, pharmacokinetic and even better safety profiles compared to their parent compounds. However, these herbal metabolite information is still scattered and waiting to be collected.
  
  
  METHODS
  HIM database manually collected so far the most comprehensive available in-vivo metabolism information for herbal active ingredients, as well as their corresponding bioactivity, organs and/or tissues distribution, toxicity, ADME and the clinical research profile. Currently HIM contains 361 ingredients and 1104 corresponding in-vivo metabolites from 673 reputable herbs. Tools of structural similarity, substructure search and Lipinski's Rule of Five are also provided. Various links were made to PubChem, PubMed, TCM-ID (Traditional Chinese Medicine Information database) and HIT (Herbal ingredients' targets databases).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  A curated database HIM is set up for the in vivo metabolites information of the active ingredients for Chinese herbs, together with their corresponding bioactivity, toxicity and ADME profile. HIM is freely accessible to academic researchers at http://www.bioinformatics.org.cn/.
authors.affiliation: School of Life Sciences and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China. cghuang@mail.shcnc.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kang
authors.forename: Kailin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Tang
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Ruixin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Jun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: Duanfeng
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Chenggang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Zhiwei
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Cao