Network Pharmacology Based Prediction of Active Ingredients and Targets of Chinese Herb She Xiang in Treating Facial Paralysis
Abstract The traditional Chinese herb, She Xiang, has been found to accelerate the recovery of facial paralysis including Bell’s palsy by acupoint application in China. However, the underlining mechanism was not well known which has become an obstacle on the way to further development. In this study, we attempted to explore the pharmacology mechanism of She Xiang on facial paralysis treatment preliminarily by bioinformatics analysis. As a result, 59 active ingredients were identified in She Xiang by Traditional Chinese Medicine Integrated Database, such as 17-Beta-Estradiol, testosterone, and 2,6-Decamethylene Pyridine. Totally 837 genes were identified to be differently expressed in the blood sample of facial paralysis patients by RNA sequencing. Finally, 33 overlapped proteins were obtained overlapped with the prediction of comparative toxicogenomics database (CTD) and BATMAN. Proteins of interest were closely related with 406 GO BP and 4 pathways. The hub protein in PPI network contained FOS, JUN, POMC, and GPER1. Pharmacology network was constructed with 15 active components of She Xiang, 33 protein targets and 4 pathways. The docking model of Androst-4-Ene-3, 17-Dione (ASD) and FUS-JUN complexes (1FOS) was predicted and constructed. In conclusion, this work indicated testosterone as the effective component of She Xiang may advance the recovery of facial paralysis by targeting FUN, MAPK and cAMP signaling pathway; docking of ASD and 1FOS might play a critical role in facial paralysis treatment by She Xiang. Further work will be carried out in human or experimental animals to test and verify the predicted results.