Metabolomics in the context of systems biology: bridging traditional Chinese medicine and molecular pharmacology

Abstract

The introduction of the concept of systems biology, enabling the study of living systems from a holistic perspective based on the profiling of a multitude of biochemical components, opens up a unique and novel opportunity to reinvestigate natural products. In the study of their bioactivity, the necessary reductionistic approach on single active components has been successful in the discovery of new medicines, but at the same time the synergetic effects of components were lost. Systems biology, and especially metabolomics, is the ultimate phenotyping. It opens up the possibility of studying the effect of complex mixtures, such as those used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, in complex biological systems; abridging it with molecular pharmacology. This approach is considered to have the potential to revolutionize natural product research and to advance the development of scientific based herbal medicine.

Application of ultra-performance LC-TOF MS metabolite profiling techniques to the analysis of medicinal Panax herbs

“…The content of dammarane-type saponins in P. ginseng was higher than in P. japonicus whereas the content of oleanane saponins was lower in P. japonicus (Guo et al 2004). These saponins are accountable for diverse therapeutic effects, thus understanding of the bio-distribution of these secondary metabolites in different type of Panax plants is paramount for the investigation of their pharmacological efficiency (Wang et al 2005) and therefore, chemical characteristics are very important for the identification and quality control of the three herbs. The metabolite profiling of Panax herbs including Chinese ginseng, American ginseng and Korean ginseng has been carried out successfully with the developed UPLC-TOFMS method and multivariate statistical analysis .…”

Immuno-Modulatory Effects of Phytomedicines Evaluated Using Omics Approaches

“…The technology platforms generally used in systems biology research, including transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, have enabled us to study living systems from a holistic or integrative perspective through revealing profiles of multitudinous biochemical components ( Figure 1); it also opens up a unique opportunity to reinvestigate phytomedicines [20]. The revolution of genomics research and technology development has yielded complete or draft DNA sequence maps for a spectrum of species including human, mouse and a serious of model organisms.…”

Symbiosis of chemometrics and metabolomics: past, present, and future

“…It provides insight how nutrition based on multiple bioactives is functioning and how herbal medicine can be studied accordingly using systems biology. In pharmaceutical research for the same reason a clear trend is observed towards combination drugs for that reason with additional economical drivers [10][11][12]. A recent volume of Nature Biotechnology [13] is focused on the aspects of systems biology and drug discovery.…”

“…In these studies based on multivariate effects of intervention, biomarkers are found that ultimately lead to revealing the underlying mechanism and, hence, to identifying potential targets in a pathway [60]. This is the straightforward approach, more complex is the reversed pharmacology based on intervention with complex mixtures such as herbal medicine and revealing the bioactive component pattern by examining the multivariate response as function of a multivariate intervention [12]. Taking this idea one step further, an ideal response can be formulated which can then be traced back to ideal targets in a pathway.…”