SpiceRx: an integrated resource for the health impacts of culinary spices and herbs

Spices and herbs are key dietary ingredients used in cuisines across the world. They have been reported to be of medicinal value for a wide variety of diseases through a large body of biomedical investigations. Bioactive phytochemicals in these plant products form the basis of their therapeutic potential as well as adverse effects. A systematic compilation of empirical data involving these aspects of culinary spices and herbs could help unravel molecular mechanisms underlying their effects on health. SpiceRx provides a platform for exploring the health impact of spices and herbs used in food preparations through a structured database of tripartite relationships with their phytochemicals and disease associations. Starting with an extensive dictionary of culinary spices and herbs, their disease associations were text mined from MEDLINE, the largest database of biomedical abstracts, assisted with manual curation. This information was further combined with spice-phytochemical and phytochemical-disease associations. SpiceRx is an integrated repertoire of evidence-based knowledge pertaining to the health impacts of culinary spices and herbs, and facilitates their disease-specific culinary recommendations as well as exploration of molecular mechanisms underlying their health effects. Availability and Implementation SpiceRx is available at http://cosylab.iiitd.edu.in/spicerx and supports all modern browsers. SpiceRx is implemented with Python web development framework Django and relational database PostgreSQL; the front-end was built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, jQuery, JSME Molecular Editor, Bootstrap, Jmol, DataTables and Google Charts. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.