Abstract
Germacrone, curdione, and furanodiene have been shown to be useful in the treatment of breast cancer but the pharmacological mechanism of action is unclear. In this paper, we explored a new method to study the molecular network and function of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) herbs and their corresponding ingredients with bioinformatics tools, including PubChem Compound Database, BATMAN-TCM, SystemsDock, Coremine Medical, Gene ontology, and KEGG. Eleven targeted genes/proteins, 4 key pathways, and 10 biological processes were identified to participate in the mechanism of action in treating breast cancer with germacrone, curdione, and furanodiene. The information achieved by the bioinformatics tools was useful to interpretation the molecular mechanism for the treatment of germacrone, curdione, and furanodiene on breast cancers.
Highlights
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has a rich history of thousands of years of clinical practice and plays a critical role in maintaining public health, especially in Asian countries
Network pharmacology-based prediction of active ingredients and potential targets of TCM is increasing in popularity for TCM modernization and internationalization
We used the PubChem_CID of germacrone, curdione, and furanodiene to analyze their function with BATMAN-TCM and identified potential genes/proteins and pathways involved
Summary
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has a rich history of thousands of years of clinical practice and plays a critical role in maintaining public health, especially in Asian countries. Our previous studies showed that these three ingredients have anti-breast cancer effects and identified some potentially targeted proteins and genes[5]. The detailed molecular targets, mechanisms, and pathways involved remain to be elucidated. Bioinformatics analysis methods, such as BATMAN-TCM (Bioinformatics Analysis Tool for Molecular mechANism of Traditional Chinese Medicine), SystemsDock, DAVID (the Database for Annotation, Visualization and Integrated Discovery), Swiss Target Prediction, KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes), are commonly used to identify pathways and key genes or proteins in human diseases and to predict the potential effects of TCM ingredients[6]. The key genes/proteins and pathways for germacrone, curdione, and furanodiene in the treatment of breast cancer using bioinformatics analyses
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