Metabonomics Research of the Four Properties in Traditional Chinese Medicine Based on UPLC-QTOF-MS System

TCM has long been practised as an empirical system and retrieved tens of millions of lives from historically to currently [1]. It is considered as an ancient and classical paradigm of systems biology. In TCM, diagnosis and medication are based on “Syndrome” (“ZHENG” in Chinese Mandarin), which can be regarded as a profile of symptom combination, or clinical phenotypes, such as Cold or Hot Syndrome, and “Hot medication curing Cold Syndrome and Cold medication curing Hot Syndrome” is a standard therapeutic guide line. This classical systems medicine at the macro level has been validated and developed by its repeated clinical practice for thousands of years [2]. Hot and Cold medication are the four properties of Chinese medicinal herbs, precisely including cold, hot, warm and cool, which are also called the four natures or “four xing” in TCM. Cold-cool and warm-hot are two completely opposite categories of natures, whereas cold and cool or hot and warm differ in the degree. Chinese medicinal herbs with cold and cool nature can clear away heat, purge fire and eliminate toxic materials, which are mainly used for heat-syndrome; while with hot and warm nature have the actions of expelling cold, which are mainly used for coldsyndrome. The four natures are summarized mainly from the body's response. On the base of syndrome differentiation theory, only distinguish heat or cold nature of disease, and have a good understanding of the cold or hot property of TCM, so selectively apply corresponding medicinal herbs that you could achieve the desired effect. Herbal medicine has attracted much attention as a means of alternative therapy along with the orthodox medical system [3, 4]. In recent 30 years more and more reports on the four natures of TCM have appeared in the literature. To date several aspects of research such as the characteristics of thermodynamics, the changes of nervous system and the endocrine glands, energy metabolism, the systems biology analysis include genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome are all supposed to explored the macro and micro framework on the four properties, among which metabonomics is the most novel tool [5]. It is a rapidly growing area of scientific research, which has been widely used in disease diagnosis, biomarker discovery, and research into the disease mechanisms [6-10]. Metabonomics aims at comparing the pattern of endogenous metabolites under defined temporal conditions as