Metabolomics highlights pharmacological bioactivity and biochemical mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine

•Traditional Chinese medicine was widely used for disease prevention and treatment.•Metabolomics has been applied to bioactivity study of traditional Chinese medicine.•Metabolomics in bioactive evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine are discussed.•Metabolomics highlights therapeutic mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has attracted increasing interest throughout the world because of its potential complementary therapy and an abundant source for new drug discovery. TCM possesses the significant bioactivity of the use of multi-component drugs and can act multiple targets by multiple components. Metabolomics is a holistic investigation of numerous metabolite responses of complex biology systems to pathological stimuli and drug treatments based on the global metabolic profiles in complex biological matrixes. It provides variation of systematic metabolic networks for characterizing pathological states in animal models and clinical studies. In agreement with the holistic thinking of TCM, metabolomics has shown potential in bioactivity evaluation and action mechanism of TCM as well as pharmaceutical research and development. Recently, different metabolomic technologies have been applied to the modernization of TCM and treatments of different diseases such as cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, liver disease and metabolic disease. Based on the reported literature, this paper introduced the application of metabolomics in efficacy evaluation of TCM and its biochemical action mechanism.

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