Biological functional analysis of Chinese herbal medicines against wind-cold-dampness syndrome

Syndrome wind-cold-dampness in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) can be referred to diseases of osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, cervical spondylitis, and spondylitis and so on. Over thousand years TCM clinical explorations, this syndrome can be treated with a group of herbal medicines in TCM. However, their molecular level biological functions are still not clear. In this study, a set of algorithms e.g., hypergeometric distribution, Jaccard index, and recursive programming for hierarchy network were deployed in the context gene/protein functional similarity and enrichment analysis. The analysis was mainly focused on the associated herbal medicines, their chemical compounds, target proteins' similarity, and gene ontology terms' hierarchical network overrepresentation through the enrichment analysis of hypergeometric distribution with P-value set to 0.05. As a result, these associated herbs share low level (<;0.5) of therapeutic similarities on target proteins, yet with common biological functions for TCM syndrome wind-cold-dampness e.g., signal transduction, transportation, chemical homeostatic and metabolic process.