The Applications and Obstacles of Metabonomics in Traditional Chinese Medicine

In the recent years, a wide range of metabonomic technologies are widely used in the modern research of traditional chinese medicine (TCM). At present, the most prevailing methods for TCM research are mainly nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). With these techniques, metabonomics will help to understand syndromes, efficacy and toxicity of TCM. However, every analytical technique has its advantages and drawbacks, and there exist some obstacles of its applications on TCM. So, we discuss metabonomics in TCM and analyze some problems of its applications to study TCM in recent years. We believe that with the further development of metabonomic analytical technology, especially multianalysed techniques, metabonomics will greatly promote TCM research and be beneficial to the modernization of TCM.