Affiliations 

  • 1 School of Information Management, Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan 250355, China
  • 2 Department of Neurology, Qingdao Municipal Hospital, Qingdao 266011, China
  • 3 Department of Immunology, School of Medical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Health Campus, 16150 Kubang Kerian, Kelantan, Malaysia
  • 4 Key Laboratory of Marine Drugs, Ministry of Education of China, School of Medicine and Pharmacy, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, Shandong Province 266003, China
PMID: 28191021 DOI: 10.1155/2017/4365715

Abstract

Traditional Chinese Marine Medicine (TCMM) represents one of the medicinal resources for research and development of novel anticancer drugs. In this study, to investigate the presence of anticancer activity (AA) displayed by cold or hot nature of TCMM, we analyzed the association relationship and the distribution regularity of TCMMs with different nature (613 TCMMs originated from 1,091 species of marine organisms) via association rules mining and phylogenetic tree analysis. The screened association rules were collected from three taxonomy groups: (1) Bacteria superkingdom, Phaeophyceae class, Fucales order, Sargassaceae family, and Sargassum genus; (2) Viridiplantae kingdom, Streptophyta phylum, Malpighiales class, and Rhizophoraceae family; (3) Holothuroidea class, Aspidochirotida order, and Holothuria genus. Our analyses showed that TCMMs with closer taxonomic relationship were more likely to possess anticancer bioactivity. We found that the cluster pattern of marine organisms with reported AA tended to cluster with cold nature TCMMs. Moreover, TCMMs with salty-cold nature demonstrated properties for softening hard mass and removing stasis to treat cancers, and species within Metazoa or Viridiplantae kingdom of cold nature were more likely to contain AA properties. We propose that TCMMs from these marine groups may enable focused bioprospecting for discovery of novel anticancer drugs derived from marine bioresources.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.