Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) follows the principle of formulae, in which the pharmacological activity of a single herb can be enhanced or potentiated by addition of other herbs. Nevertheless, the involved synergy mechanisms in formulae remain unknown. Here, a systems-based method is proposed and applied to three representative Chinese medicines in compound saffron formula (CSF): two animal spices (Moschus, Beaver Castoreum), and one herb Crocus sativus which exert synergistic effects for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). From the formula, 42 ingredients and 66 corresponding targets are acquired based on the ADME evaluation and target fishing model. The network relationships between the compounds and targets are assembled with CVDs pathways to elucidate the synergistic therapeutic effects between the spices and the herbs. The results show that different compounds of the three medicines show similar curative activity in CVDs. Additionally, the active compounds from them shared CVDs-relevant targets (multiple compounds-one target), or functional diversity targets but with clinical relevance (multiple compounds-multiple targets-one disease). Moreover, the targets of them are largely enriched in the same CVDs pathways (multiple targets-one pathway). These results elucidate why animal spices and herbs can have pharmacologically synergistic effects on CVDs, which provides a new way for drug discovery.

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In the present study, we reported the allele frequencies for new 21 autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) loci, including D6S474, D12ATA63, D22S1045, D10S1248, D1S1677, D11S4463, D1S1627, D3S4529, D2S441, D6S1017, D4S2408, D19S433, D17S1301, D1GATA113, D18S853, D20S482, D14S1434, D9S1122, D2S1776, D10S1435 and D5S2500 loci. Forensic statistical parameters were estimated from a sample set of 120 unrelated healthy individuals from the Salar ethnic group in Xunhua Salar Autonomous County of Qinghai province, China. A total of 151 alleles were observed at 21 STR loci in the population, and their allele frequencies were in the range of 0.004-0.554. All STR loci showed a high degree of genetic polymorphisms, and the combined probability of exclusion, combined power of discrimination and combined probability of matching for all 21 STR loci were 0.9999993134, 0.99999999999999999991739 and 8.2607 × 10(-20), respectively. For all the 21 STR loci in the Salar ethnic group, the observed genotypic data showed no significant deviation from those expected under the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. The allele frequency distributions for the 21 autosomal STR loci were compared between the Salar group and its neighboring populations and significant differences were detected among these populations at D1S1677, D2S441, D3S4529, D4S2408, D6S1017, D11S4463, D12ATA63, D14S14343, D18S853, D19S433 and D22S1045 loci.