• Since the release of the "Feed Ingredients Directory", research on natural plants for feed use has flourished.
• However, the development of feed-use natural plants remains limited, with insufficient data coverage. Research in the field of feed-use natural plants has not been fully advanced.
• The application of information from traditional Chinese medicine databases to address issues such as unclear mechanisms and unknown component targets in natural plants lacks accuracy and credibility.
• Existing natural plant products with elucidated functional effects cannot be effectively screened or predicted based on pathway targets.
• By employing web crawlers and data mining technologies, basic data on 117 feed-use natural plants and their functional components associated with five ruminant species were retrieved from public databases. A cellular functional fingerprint profiling system was used to evaluate and construct a relationship network database linking functional components, biological functions, and action targets of feed-use natural plants for ruminants. This resolves the issues of data fragmentation and scarcity in natural plant research for ruminants and provides a data foundation for searching and integrating new functional feed-use natural plants and components.
•Automated programs and web crawlers were utilized to acquire target information related to functional components of feed-use natural plants from open databases. For each feed-use natural plant, a database was generated, classifying the functional components-targets-cellular functional fingerprints for five common ruminant species.
•The functional and component similarity of natural plants was evaluated to provide a basis for the development of functional analogs and substitutes for natural plant functional components.
•Target filtering was further refined using protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks to remove redundant data. Target pathways and annotations were enriched through whole-genome information from five ruminant species, enabling characterization of the functions of natural plants across different species.