Biomedical Network Regulated By Acanthopanacis Cortex (Wu-Jia-Pi) For Ossification

Acanthopanacis Cortex (AC) is a Chinese herbal medicine (Wu-Jia-Pi in PinYin) which is recognized with therapeutic effect of "strengthening bone and sinew", yet its regulating biological network is still obscure. In this study, started from AC's chemical compounds, their direct target proteins were filtered out. Then these targeted proteins were annotated with biological processes under the framework of Gene Ontology (GO) terms' hierarchical networks which were overrepresented and enriched with them with statistic significant p-value set to 0.05. In the biological process hierarchy networks, ossification formed a big one with bone formation associated biological processes. Further protein-protein interaction analysis with these targeted proteins and bone expressed ones formed a clear and concise protein-regulation network for ossification which should be responsible for the therapeutic effect of "strengthening bone and sinew". This study proposed a new approach of analyzing biological functions of a specified Chinese herbal medicine targeting certain therapeutic effect.