Abstract
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), a complex natural herbal medicine system, has increasingly attracted attention from all over the world. Most research has illustrated the mechanism of TCM based on the active components or single herbs. It was fruitful and effective but far from satisfactory as it failed to gain insights into the interactivity and combined effects of TCM. In this work, we used Bupleurum chinense (B. chinense DC, a species in the genus Bupleurum, family Apiaceae) and Scutellaria baicalensis (S. baicalensis Georgi, a species in the genus Scutellaria, family Lamiaceae), an herbal pair in TCM, to illustrate the combined effect. We compared the diverse effects between the B. chinense-S. baicalensis herbal pair and its compositions in an animal model of Alcoholic Liver Injury to highlight the advantages of the formula. Biochemical and histological indicators revealed that the effect of B. chinense-S. baicalensis was better than its individual parts. Furthermore, metabolite profiling of the serum, liver tissue, and feces were conducted to reveal that the herbal pair largely presented its effects through enhanced tissue penetration to maintain liver-located intervention with less global and symbiotic disturbance. Furthermore, we analyzed the distribution of the metal elements in extracts of the serum and liver tissue and found that the herbal pair significantly regulated the distribution of endogenous selenium in liver tissue. As selenium plays an important role in the anti-oxidative and hepatoprotective effects, it may be the reason for combined effects in BS formula. This research could open new perspectives for exploring the material basis of combined effects in natural herbal medicine.
Highlights
MATERIALS AND METHODSTraditional Chinese Medicine, a complex medical system with a long history of usage, has increasingly been examined
We found that decoctions of B. chinense-S. baicalensis and S. baicalensis, alongside a water solution of Baicalin and in addition to the mixture of Baicalin and Saikosaponin, could reverse the biochemical disturbances in alcoholic liver injury (ALI) (Figures 1A,B)
After metallomic analysis of BS herbal pair treatment, we found that arsenic was increased in the serum, but calcium, vanadium, FIGURE 3 | B. chinense-S. baicalensis herbal pair altered the distribution of metal contents in the serum and liver tissue. (A) Comparison of metal contents between average of Bupleurum chinense (BU) and Scutellaria baicalensis (SC) and BS. (B) Comparison of serum metal contents between average of BU-treated and SC-treated rats and BS-treated rats. (C) Comparison of hepatic metal contents between average of BU-treated and SC-treated rats and BS-treated rats
Summary
MATERIALS AND METHODSTraditional Chinese Medicine, a complex medical system with a long history of usage, has increasingly been examined. Many endeavors have been made to unveil the mechanisms of TCM by way of the separation strategy, which is to study the pharmacodynamic material basis by tapering the entire formula to single herbs, even to single active components. Study of the complexity of TCM requires a different strategy as the separation strategy may lose sight of the interactivity and combined effects (Zheng et al, 2013). Systems biology combined with physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology and tongue image digitization were employed to evaluate the treatment effect and explore the mechanisms of the TCM formula (Wu et al, 2010; Dai et al, 2013a; Sun et al, 2013). Metal or semi-metal elements have attracted our attention for the numerous physiological and biochemical functions, helping researchers to better illustrate the complex pharmacodynamic mechanism of TCM (Dong et al, 2006; Yan et al, 2015; Deng et al, 2018)
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