Recent advances in proteomic strategies for target identification of traditional Chinese medicine

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played an indispensable role in health intervention and disease treatment. Identifying the target proteins of TCM is crucial to clarifying therapeutic mechanisms. One approach taken to enhance the breadth, depth, and precision of studies on the active cellular pathways induced by TCM is to use proteomics to reveal potential drug targets with direct interactions. Proteomic strategies facilitate identifying and characterizing target binding proteins relevant to metabolic pathways, which involves enriching the complex of small molecule and their targets based on the affinity, as well as utilizing the changes in physicochemical properties of target proteins that occur due to drug binding for proteomic identification and quantification. Probe labeling and enrichment technologies have accelerated the field of chemical proteomics. Technologies focused on measuring the changes in target proteins have been widely extended into several different approaches, and these now drive the establishment of further strategies. This review summarizes the advances in proteomics strategies mainly based on mass spectrometry (MS) for the identification of TCM targets to the present. Enhancing the application of proteomics would provide a new viewpoint on TCM treatment, while underscores the potential of TCM as biological probes and sources of novel drug candidates.