Biology

Computational biology

Nucleic Acids Research

Xenobiotic and host active substances interact with gut microbiota to influence human health and therapeutics. Dietary, pharmaceutical, herbal and environmental substances are modified by microbiota with altered bioavailabilities, bioactivities and toxic effects. Xenobiotics also affect microbiota with health implications. Knowledge of these microbiota and active substance interactions is important for understanding microbiota-regulated functions and therapeutics. Established microbiota databases provide useful information about the microbiota-disease associations, diet and drug interventions, and microbiota modulation of drugs. However, there is insufficient information on the active substances modified by microbiota and the abundance of gut bacteria in humans. Only ∼7% drugs are covered by the established databases. To complement these databases, we developed MASI, Microbiota-Active Substance Interactions database, for providing the information about the microbiota alteration of various substances, substance alteration of microbiota, and the abundance of gut bacteria in humans. These include 1,051 pharmaceutical, 103 dietary, 119 herbal, 46 probiotic, 142 environmental substances interacting with 806 microbiota species linked to 56 diseases and 784 microbiota-disease associations. MASI covers 11 215 bacteria-pharmaceutical, 914 bacteria-herbal, 309 bacteria-dietary, 753 bacteria-environmental substance interactions and the abundance profiles of 259 bacteria species in 3465 patients and 5334 healthy individuals. MASI is freely accessible at http://www.aiddlab.com/MASI.

MASI: microbiota—active substance interactions database