Yunnan is known as the "Kingdom of Plants", with a total of 6,559 species of medicinal resources in its territory, which is an important treasure trove of traditional Chinese medicine and ethnic medicine resources in China. In addition to the Han Chinese, Yunnan has 25 ethnic minorities with a population of more than 5,000, making it a large multi-ethnic family. Each ethnic group has its own cultural origin and heritage, as well as its own understanding and application of medicine.The Yunnan Ethnic Medicine Database(YEM) brings together the knowledge of recognising medicine and the experience of using medicine of the famous ethnic groups in Yunnan. The purpose of this database is to provide plant information and corresponding compounds of Yunnan ethnic medicines, and to provide important data resources for the inheritance of ethnic medicine, support for the protection of ethnic medicine, and the development and use of ethnic medicine.

The Yunnan Ethnic Medicine Database (YEM) contains 8846 traditional Chinese herbs and 1322 Yunnan ethnic medicines. Among them, there are 755 species of Yi and Dai medicines. Min Xu's laboratory has long been engaged in the chemical biology of natural products of Yunnan ethnic medicines and has collected 853 species of plants. Based on the resources of Yunnan ethnic medicines, we conduct cross-research on natural medicinal chemistry and chemical biology, focusing on the efficient discovery and identification, assembly and conformational optimization and probing of natural drug molecules in Southwest ethnic/Chinese medicines, research on target proteins and their mechanisms of action in tumours, viral infectious diseases, neurological disorders and other major diseases, and the discovery of innovative drug lead molecules with new target proteins and mechanisms of action.