[Methodology and applications for multimodal identification of active constituents of traditional Chinese medicine].

The discovery of active constituents of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) faces multiple challenges, such as limited approaches to evaluate poly-pharmacological effects, and the lack of systematic methods to identify active constituents. Aimed at these bottleneck problems in the field, the present study intensively discussed the key scientific problems in the identification of active constituents of TCM, based on scientific methodologies including systematology, information theory, and synergetics. A comprehensive strategy is herein proposed to investigate the correlations between the chemical composition and biological activities of TCM, from macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. Moreover, in this study, we systematically proposed the methodology of the multimodal identification of TCM active constituents, and thoroughly constructed its core technologies. Its technical framework is suggested to be assessed by multimodal information acquisition, centered on multisource information fusion, and focused on interaction evaluation. Furthermore, the core technologies for the multimodal identification of active constituents of TCM were developed in this study, which is according to the characteristics of the exchanges of between TCM and biological organisms, in the aspects of material, energy and information. Finally, two examples of the application of the proposed method were briefly introduced. The proposed methodology provides a novel way to solve the bottlenecks in the study of active constituents of TCM, and lays the foundation for the multimodal study of TCM.