Multi-omics technology for demystifying herbal medicine

Abstract

Herbal medicine (HM) is a fruitful source of chemical substances that has contributed greatly to the pharmaceutical industry and novel therapeutics. Natural products derived from HM continue to be a rich source of lead compounds because of their high structural diversity and potent bioactivities. However, despite the success of active ingredients derived from HM in drug discovery, compatibility issues that make huge challenging for extended timelines of effective evaluation, chemical composition identification, active ingredient screening and target confirmation. However, some approaches solely cannot effectively elucidate the overall effect and action mechanism due to complexity muti-components of HM. Thus, integration strategies combining modern analytical techniques with HM are increasingly being developed in the era of big data and omics. The updated mass spectrometry has been used to identify natural product structure and their mode of action on biological processes. Their molecular properties are validated through the use of recent high-throughput multi-omics including transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic tools and bio-informatics, molecular docking, network pharmacology techniques that enable to accelerate natural product discovery. We summarized several important omics technical platforms and multi-omics-based integration approach as powerful strategies to demystify HM and discover new bioactive molecules.