Chinese scientists have launched an herbal medicine gene database project this month, which is expected to combine traditional Chinese medical science with gene pharmaceutical technology.

According to China Human Genome Center authorities at Shanghai gene technology would be used to decode the mysterious effect of traditional Chinese medicine. The project, named "the world's largest native compound gene database", will detect more than 5,000 effective elements of traditional Chinese medicine and put them into the herbal medicine gene database.

Human genome technology has brought vital changes to the bio-pharmaceutical industry, and China will make it a platform to develop traditional Chinese medical science, they said. For thousands of years, the Chinese have used mixtures of plant and animal bones to cure disease with a success rate that continues to baffle modern science. With the completion of the international genome research in 2003, Chen noted, scientists would fully understand the "human genetic map", making further research into genetic information relating to human disease and lifespan possible.

After the native compound gene database is established, Chinese scientists will use all the 5,000 effective elements discovered intraditional Chinese medicine to test disease-related human genes, in a bid to decipher traditional Chinese medicine.

The most famous Chinese medical encyclopedia "Bencao Gangmu" (or "Compendium of Materia Medica") records only 1,892 herbs. Another medical book "Zhonghua Bencao" published in 1995 contains over 8,000 herbs, and the native compound gene database will cover the most important of these plants.

However, experts said the greatest difficulty in combining traditional Chinese medicine and gene technology was to detect which elements of traditional Chinese medicine were useful or futile. This is why we should build a herbal medicine database first; we must find out the pathogenesis, which is an urgent task.

-Xinhua