Exploration into the mechanism of total flavonoids of Astragali Radix in the treatment of nephrotic syndrome based on network pharmacology / 药学学报

ABSTRACT

This study was designed to explore the mechanism of total flavonoids of Astragali Radix (TFA) in treating nephrotic syndrome through establishing the active components-targets network and protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks and analyzing the functions and pathways involved in the targets. The main active ingredients of TFA were obtained by 1H NMR and LC-MS, TCMSP and TCMID database. PharmMapper, SEA, SIB, HOME-NCBI-GENE, GeneCards and OMIM were used to predict and screen the active components of TFA. The Cytoscape software was used to construct the active components-targets network and protein-protein interactions network. The relation between the main active ingredients and targets were validated by Systems Dock Web Site. The GO and KEGG pathways involved in the targets were analyzed by ClueGO software. The target organ distribution was assigned by the BioGPS database. The results showed that 29 active components and 50 targets of TFA were screened and predicted. The network results showed that the TFA were mainly involved in biological processes such as inflammatory reaction process, oxidative stress process,apoptosis and autophagy, and played a role in the regulation of AGE-RAGE, PI3K/Akt, VEGF, IL-17 and MAPK signaling pathways to treat the nephrotic syndrome. This study reflects the characteristics of multi-components, multi-targets and multi-pathways of TFA, which provides new ideas and clues for further research on the mechanism of anti-nephrotic syndrome effects of TFA.