MA Jiamu, DONG Ying, WEI Jing, YU Axiang, SONG Ruolan, YAO Jianling, SHAN Dongjie, LYU Fang, DENG Qingyue, LI Xianxian, HE Yingyu, MENG Fanyu, SHE Gaimei
To screen and identify the quality markers from Baiji Wuweizi Granule with the function of the protection of liver injury and gastric mucosa injury based on the network pharmacology and molecular docking, an HPLC-DAD content determination method was established. This study obeyed the general idea of improving the quality control of healthy food by replacing the determination of total components with the determination of multiple functional components to enable the quality of the product and adopted the concept of quality markers in the quality control of traditional Chinese medicine to screen the functional components by the method of network pharmacology. 59 main components of Baiji Wuweizi Granule and 74 same targets of diseases and herbs were collected from TCMSP, GEO, and Genecards databases. Functional components and core targets were obtained based on PPI and the “drug-disease-targets” network. Eleven core targets including AKT1, PTGS2, and HSP90AA1 were obtained, and six functional components, including hesperidin, schisandrin, nobiletin, schisandrin B, formononetin, and deoxyschizandrin, having the protection of gastric mucosa and liver injury were obtained. Results of the enrichment of GO and KEGG showed that the reaction to chemical stress, steroid metabolism, alcohol, lipid, and atherosclerosis pathway, IL-17 signalling pathway, and other pathways related to lipid metabolism, oxidative stress, and inflammatory response was involved in the function of Baiji Wuweizi Granule in protecting stomach and liver. Results indicated that the mode of “multi-component- multi-target-multi-pathway” was the implementation method of the Baiji Wuweizi Granule function. The ligand-receptor level binding activity of the target and components was predicted by the molecular docking method, while the results showed that all components could bind well with targets, and the top 3 binding activities were hesperidin, schisandrin, and deoxyschizandrin, respectively. In addition, the content determination results showed that all functional components could be detected in the product. The results of this study provided an idea for the discovery of quality markers in Baiji Wuweizi granules of healthy food, and the established method for the determination of quality markers was accurate and stable, which provided a reference for quality control in actual production.