[Advance of studies on metabolic fingerprinting analytical techniques and data processing methods].

Metabolomics is an emerging discipline subsequent to genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics, aiming for systematically studying the regularity of changes in metabolite to revealing organism's nature of movement and metabolism. It is especially important in modern pharmacological studies. Metabolic fingerprinting analysis is a method for metabolic analysis on high throughput of all metabolites, studying changes in drugs, organisms and endogenic metabolites caused by drugs and finding out related biomarkers to reflect dynamic changes inside organisms more directly and explain the mechanism of drugs and their effects on diseases. This essay summarizes some new metabolic fingerprint analytical methods and data processing methods used for metabolic fingerprint, elaborates their advantages and disadvantages and looks ahead to their combination with studies on traditional Chinese medicines, providing room for the development of new methods and new approaches for studies on complexity theory system of traditional Chinese medicines.