The study on the targets of traditional Chinese medicine is an important part of researchers using modern scientific language to clarify the mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine. However, the research on the targets of Chinese medicine is full of challenges due to the complexity of active ingredients. As a branch of systems biology, proteomics focus on specific proteins in living organisms from a holistic perspective, which significantly improves the efficiency of targets discovery and has obvious advantages in the research of targets of Chinese medicine. Based on relevant literature and different methods used in targets of Chinese medicine, proteomics can be divided into chemical proteomics, differential proteomics and quantitative proteomics. The applications of the above three methods are illustrated in this paper as well, which will provide new methods and ideas for the study of the mechanism of Chinese medicine in the future.
Keywords: chemical proteomics; differential proteomics; quantitative proteomics; targets of traditional Chinese medicine(TCM).