Technological advances in current metabolomics and its application in tradition Chinese medicine

Abstract

During the last few years, many metabolomics technologies have been established in biomedical research for analyzing the changes of metabolite levels. They have also become important tools in the field of life sciences and are widely applied to discover innovative drugs, providing valuable methods to explore the function and essence of formulas in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) research. Metabolomics shows major potential to provide a unique perspective for disease diagnosis and elucidate the action mechanism of TCM by measuring endogenous metabolites in biofluids. With the gradual expansion of the application fields of metabolomics, the related number of techniques is increasing day by day. The techniques of choice for the study of various low-molecular-weight metabolic pathways, and for the analysis of metabolites in search of the changes of biomarkers in TCM treatment of disease in biological samples include nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry, and so forth. These techniques have been proven to be powerful tools for the detection of metabolites and biomarkers. Here, we will introduce the newly used analytical techniques for metabolomics, and metabolomics in TCM is also summarized.