Progress on the Screening and Analysis of Bioactive Compounds in Traditional Chinese Medicines by Biological Fingerprinting Analysis

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs), a key branch of natural medicines, play an important role in treatment of diseases because of their reliable clinical performance. Identification of their active compounds constitutes a bottleneck in the development of TCMs. Screening and analysis of active compounds is a challenge in TCMs research. This review summarizes recent progress in the development of biological fingerprinting strategies for screening and analyzing of bioactive compounds in TCMs using molecular recognition, metabolism and omics tools.The evaluated strategies including the following techniques: microdialysis/centrifugal ultrafiltration-HPLC, biochromatography, metabolic fingerprinting analysis, 2-dimensional biochromatography and omics fingerprinting analysis.

Rapid screening and identification of α‐glucosidase inhibitors from mulberry leaves using enzyme‐immobilized magnetic beads coupled with HPLC/MS and NMR

“…In recent years, screening active compounds by bio-affinity chromatography or affinity preparation coupled with chromatography (Su et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2010aWang et al, , 2010bZajdel et al, 2003Zajdel et al, , 2004Zhang et al, 2008;Zhou et al, 2008) has emerged as a novel approach for discovering hit compounds in biomedical research (Yu et al, 2010). These methods exhibit better accuracy and efficiency compared with the traditional screening methods, which contribute to their capacity to detect bioactive compounds and identify corresponding chemical structures simultaneously.…”

Rapid screening of enzyme inhibitors using Profiling of Enzyme-Metabolite Assay by HPLC (PREMA-HPLC)

“…Even though a lot of work going on in the area of metabolomics and HTS, much of the progress is seen in a combination of physical and analytical techniques such as gas chromatography-MS, LC-MS or LC-UV-MS, LC-NMR, etc [17][18][19] . Central to the discovery of new bioactive molecules is the biological assay.…”

Biological Fingerprinting of Herbal Samples by Means of Liquid Chromatography

“…Novel detection techniques as well as hyphenations may also be proposed to detect bioactive Chromatography Research International 7 compounds present in plant extracts. Yu et al describe the potential of coupling BFA with omics technologies in the discovery of bioactive compounds in traditional Chinese medicines [5]. Thus BFA can be regarded as a powerful and still developing tool in drug discovery.…”

“…Apart from qualitative and quantitative data, it gives also the possibility to fish out the active compounds from a myriad of compounds present in herbal samples. HPLC biological fingerprinting techniques have been well reviewed by Su et al [4] and Yu et al [5].…”