1 Departmnet of Botany, R D Govt College, Sivagangai, Tamilnadu, India
2 Department of Bioinfomatics, Alagappa University, Karaikudi, Tamilnadu, India
WHO depicts that over 80% of world's population depends on natural diversity and traditional system of medicine for healthcare needs (WHO, 2000). India, traditional medical practices are empirical in nature; however, an estimate suggests that over 200 million people with limited access to the primary healthcare services still depend on traditional medicine for healthcare needs. In recent times, mounting body of research is hoisting the credibility of underexplored traditional knowledge in meeting the challenges of primary healthcare services globally to treat diseases like diabetics. AYUSH and other Indian folklore system of medicine use plants to treat ailments. Surprisingly, many of the tribal and local communes in the rural area exploit the therapeutic potential of common plants that have not received much attention as their therapeutic potential is less known or have been scientifically unexplored. India possesses a total of 427 tribal communities with splendid diversity of indigenous tradition. The knowledge base and the practice have been marginalized due to political, social and economical reasons. Valaiyans of Alagarkoil are known to use more than 100 of plants as source to treat diabetics. Since in depth study on the usage of medicinal plants by Valaiyans of Alagarkoil Hills is far lacking, an attempt will be made to fill this gap. Anti-Diabetic Medicinal Plants diversity informatics at present is not at instant access, data on anti-diabetic medicinal plants diversity either scanty in existing databases or other media not amenable to interactive search. Moreover majority of the literature do not contain photochemical informatics, ethnobotanical information, local names, in key words that make the computer search much more complicate. Literature survey on anti-diabetic medicinal plants diversity suggest that vast amount of information may be available in the scattered literature and has not been digitized. Therefore in the present study an attempt has been made to create a database for Anti-Diabetic Medicinal Plants diversity informatics. Database Anti-Diabetic Medicinal Plants diversity (DADMP) has been systematically designed by cataloguing the information available on Anti-Diabetic Medicinal Plants and linked to various National and international databases (NCBI Entrez, EMBL-EBI, Swiss-Prot, OpenIsis and Google) that provides added information on Anti-Diabetic Medicinal Plants. DADMP expected to serve the Academicians, Researches and Conservationists to exploit medicinal Anti-Diabetic Medicinal Plants in a sustainable manner for ethnopharmacological purposes.