In recent years,traditional identification methods(botanical source and morphological identification,microscopic identification,and physiochemical identification)have been unable to meet the demands of rapid development in Chinas pharmaceutical industry.DNA barcoding technology emerged in 2003 and revolutionized the available identification methods.Our team proposed and verified that nuclear ITS2 is suitable to identify traditional Chinese medicines(TCMs).A novel identification system for Chinese herbal medicines in Chinese Pharmacopoeia(ChP),which employs DNA barcodes,was set up and has been adopted in the latest ChP(2015 edition).However,systematic research on identification of TCMs in ChP by using DNA barcoding remains inadequate.In this study,we established a DNA barcoding database for medicinal species in ChP(http://www.tcmbarcode.cn/en/).One sample of original species and three samples of medicinal materials were available for each Chinese Materia Medica.Most of the samples were collected from China,whereas some of them were collected from other countries,such as Japan,Korea,Canada,and the United States.To date,six different modules have been implemented in the web server,namely,Identification,Protocol,Database,News,Documents,and Register.In the Identification module,nr ITS2 was the core DNA barcode for identifying medicinal plants,whereas the psbA-trnH region was a complementary barcode.COI was used to identify medicinal animals.The database provides standard sequences for each medicinal species in ChP,thereby contributing great practical significance to clinical safety in utilization of TCMs.Furthermore,this system can help prevent illegal drug trade in circulation.