National TCM Key Lab of Serum Pharmacochemistry, Heilongjiang University of Chinese Medicine, Heping Road 24, Harbin, China.
Planta Med. 2010 Dec;76(17):2026-35. doi: 10.1055/s-0030-1250542. Epub 2010 Nov 5.
Metabolomics represent a global understanding of metabolite complement of integrated living systems and dynamic responses to the changes of both endogenous and exogenous factors and has many potential applications and advantages for the research of complex systems. As a systemic approach, metabolomics adopts a "top-down" strategy to reflect the function of organisms from the end products of the metabolic network and to understand metabolic changes of a complete system caused by interventions in a holistic context. This property agrees with the holistic thinking of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a complex medical science, suggesting that metabolomics has the potential to impact our understanding of the theory behind the evidence-based Chinese medicine. Consequently, the development of robust metabolomic platforms will greatly facilitate, for example, the understanding of the action mechanisms of TCM formulae and the analysis of Chinese herbal (CHM) and mineral medicine, acupuncture, and Chinese medicine syndromes. This review summarizes some of the applications of metabolomics in special TCM issues with an emphasis on metabolic biomarker discovery.
代谢组学代表了对整合生物系统代谢物成分的全面理解，以及对内外因素变化的动态响应，它在复杂系统的研究中有许多潜在的应用和优势。作为一种系统方法，代谢组学采用“自上而下”的策略，从代谢网络的末端产物反映生物体的功能，并在整体背景下了解完整系统由于干预而引起的代谢变化。这一特性与复杂医学科学——中医的整体思维相吻合，这表明代谢组学有可能影响我们对基于证据的中医理论背后的理解。因此，强大的代谢组学平台的发展将极大地促进对中医方剂作用机制的理解，以及对中药和矿物药、针灸和中医证候的分析。本文综述了代谢组学在一些特殊中医问题上的应用，重点介绍了代谢生物标志物的发现。
