In the principle of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), clinical usage is based on drug attributes of the herbal medicine. The cold and hot properties of TCM are classified accordingly to their pharmacological effects, such as temperature change. Herbal medicine has been used as food supplements in our daily life, and the thermogenetic regulation is one of their primary applications. However, the underlying mechanism of “cold” or “hot” stimulating effect of herbal medicine has not been fully identified.

Thermogenetic regulation and classification of herbal medicine of hot/cold herbs were determined by rat model of yeast-induced fever.

Here, a novel method in classifying and characterizing cold- and hot-herbal medicines was established by analyses of mass spectrometry (MS)-based metabolomics and lipidomics from the serum of herbal extract-treated rats. The yeast-induced inflammatory rats were used as the model system, which were subjected to the treatments of cold- or hot-herbal medicine.

The multi-omics approach identified the clustering of metabolites from cold and hot herb-treated rat serum by using partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and which subsequently identified that the 8-h treatment was the metabolic perturbation point of herb-mediated thermogenesis. Meanwhile, the levels of identified metabolites in the serum, i.e. lysoPE, lysoPC and carnitine, showed a positive relationship with the regulation of body temperature; while the levels of amino acid, fatty acid and bile acid were contrary correlated with the temperature change. In addition, the differential expressed metabolites were subjected to pathway enrichment and network analyses in revealing the possible action mechanism of herbal medicines in relating to thermogenetic regulation.

The developed MS-based omics provides a new insight in characterizing the properties of cold/hot herbal medicine.