ABSTRACT
Objective: To set a criterion for determining whether herbs distribute to kidney meridian from the perspective of tissue expression of protein receptors, so as to provide new ideas and a new method for the quantitative study of meridian tropism. Method: The 9 Yang-tonifying herbs were selected as the training set, and 2 Yang-tonifying herbs were used as the verification set. The TCMSP2.3,PubChem,Uniprot and other database were used to collect the active compounds and targets of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM). The core target proteins of Yang-tonifying herbs were obtained by using the Maximum Similarity Algorithm for TCM in the training set. The THPA database was used to collect expressions of tissues and target proteins. The empirical regression equation was constructed to explore the tissue distribution of the receptors in the training set, and the criterion for determining whether herbs distribute to kidney meridian was established. The criteria model was tested through validation set data. Result: The herb-active ingredient-protein receptor-tissue expression data library was constructed. A total of 39 core target proteins of Yang-tonifying herbs were acquired. The equations in the training set were highly consistent, with no statistical difference (P=0.999 7). The data of the combined training set was finally fitted to a judgment equation. The model was successfully tested with herbs in the validation set. The accuracy of the model was 100%. Conclusion: This study explored a new method for judging whether TCM distributes to kidney meridian, established an effective criterion model and verified the reliability of the new method. It provides a theoretical basis for the modernization of meridian tropism of traditional Chinese medicine, and is of great significance for the rapid development of traditional Chinese medicine.