After over 3 years of work, the Alban Muller Group is launching the A.M.I. Encyclopedia, a database of plants exclusively for professionals in the cosmetics, food supplements and phytopharmacy industries. This bi-lingual (English, French) database is accessible on the Internet upon subscription (€350/yr), and has gathered 250 plants to start that have been studied and analysed by the group.
The A.M.I. Encyclopedia offers direct access to a volume of knowledge on the plant world. It brings together technical information on plants for cosmetic, phytotherapy and well-being food use, with a search engine specifically designed to meet all the needs of the professionals in the industry.
The database will grow monthly with newly added plants. This innovating tool was designed both to facilitate research for laboratories and development teams, and to help marketing departments find the best ingredients to create a product or range. In addition to its content, the A.M.I. Encyclopedia lies has also specifically-developed its search engine. It is easy and rapid in finding plants:
• By precise climate zone (altitude, arid, very cold, tropical, etc.),
• By habitat (desert, fresh water, scrubland, savannah, etc.),
• By morphological type (alga, tree, mushroom, climbing plant, etc.),
• By symbolism or legend;
As well as plant parts:
• Containing a given chemical compound (carbohydrates, protids, lipids, minerals, vitamins, organic acids, phenolic compounds, terpenoids, etc.),
• With a specific property (in cosmetics: moisturising, antioxidant, softening, etc.; in pharmacy: healing, anti-acne, analgesic, etc.; in food: leg comfort, relaxation, elimination, energy, etc.), etc.
The detailed content includes a bilingual English-French list with the following tabs for each plant:
- Its characteristics: family, morphological type, habitat, climate zone, production zone, zone of origin;
- Its botanical description; - Its history: its etymology, traditional uses and legends;
- A bibliography;
- An iconography. An index in 7 languages (Latin, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese) listing all the names of the plants in the Encyclopedia with their synonyms: a function which offers the best precision for research.
More specific information is available, to help professionals find out more about the plant part(s) used (fruit, leaf, flower, seed, bark, etc.), their chemical composition with the hierarchical list of molecules, and possible use in phytotherapy, food and/or cosmetics. The internet Web site is the new generation ‘A.M.I. CD-Rom’ (edited in 1997), which has become the reference tool in many R&D laboratories working on plants.