Abstract
Two concepts involving natural products were proposed and demonstrated in this paper. (1) Natural product libraries (e.g. herbal extract) are not perfect for bioactivity screening because of the vast complexity of compound compositions, and thus a library reconstruction procedure is necessary before screening. (2) The traditional mode of “screening single compound” could be improved to “screening single compound, drug combination and multicomponent interaction” due to the fact that herbal medicines work by integrative effects of multi-components rather than single effective constituents. Based on the two concepts, we established a novel strategy aiming to make screening easier and deeper. Using thrombin as the model enzyme, we firstly uncovered the minor lead compounds, potential drug combinations and multicomponent interactions in an herbal medicine of Dan-Qi pair, showing a significant advantage over previous methods. This strategy was expected to be a new and promising mode for investigation of herbal medicines.
Highlights
Bioactive compound” to “single bioactive compound, drug combination and multicomponent interaction” may make a significant difference in drug discovery
The current study aims to establish a new mode for comprehensively exploring both the bioactive molecules and multicomponent interactions in herbal medicines, which might be the key to explanation of their pharmacological benefits
Steady baselines and good peak shapes were clearly seen in both the analytical chromatogram (Figure S1a) and the semi-preparative chromatogram (Figure S1b) with the elution conditions described in Methods
Summary
Bioactive compound” to “single bioactive compound, drug combination and multicomponent interaction” may make a significant difference in drug discovery. The current study aims to establish a new mode for comprehensively exploring both the bioactive molecules and multicomponent interactions in herbal medicines, which might be the key to explanation of their pharmacological benefits. (1) Classification of the compounds in an herb into several chemical families. (2) Reconstruction of a new compound library based on the original herb extract. A significant feature of this protocol was that the crude herbal extract was replaced with the reconstructed compound library for high-throughput screening. Based on the reconstruction theory, this strategy could be expanded to other libraries containing compounds with the similar chemical skeletons such as combinatorial library. According to the clinical experience of DQP, it is reasonable to assume that some bioactive components against thrombin may exist and there are significant interactions among multi-components. DQP was used as the natural product library for illustrating the present strategy
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