Chemical Biology Study in Traditional Chinese Medicine: Target profiling of Bioactive Natural Products

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), whose therapeutic efficacy has long been proved by thousands of years of clinical usage, is an important part of public healthcare and medicine research in China and Asian countries. Natural products derived from TCM are appreciated for their structural and functional diversity, which allow them to be ideal tools for the chemical biology study. However, target identification is still a big challenge for natural products discovery with novel structures and significant bioactivity without specific targets. Over the past few years, techniques of genomics and proteomics, as well as tools of chemobioinformatics have been employed for the target profiling of natural products in our lab. Some successful examples, especially the identification and validation of Bcl-2, 5-LO, DPP-IV and falcipain 2, for anti-tumor, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic and anti-microbic natural products, will be introduced in this presentation. Acknowledgements: The work was supported by NSFC(30725045), and in part by the Scientific Foundation of Shanghai China (09dZ1975700, 10DZ1971400). References: [1] Zhang SD, Lu WQ, et al. (2011) MedChemComm 2: 471–477.