This study aims to clarify the effect of Jingfang Mixture on the treatment of chronic urticarial and its mechanism, and investigate the regulatory effect of chronic urticaria on the metabolic disorder of endogenous metabolites in the blood. The mice were randomly divided into normal group, model group, and Jingfang Mixture group, and modeling and administration continued for 21 d. The changes in endogenous small molecules in rat serum were determined by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-Q Exactive-Orbitrap-mass spectrometry(UHPLC-ESI-QE-Orbitrap-MS) metabolomics technology. The change trend of endogenous metabolites in rat serum was analyzed to find potential biomarkers. The results showed that Jingfang Mixture regulate 16 biomarkers, mainly including taurine, glutamate, succinic acid, docosahexaenoic acid, and arachidonic acid. Metabolic pathway analysis was carried out by MetaboAnalyst, and P<0.01 was taken as the potential key metabolic pathway. Ten metabolic pathways were closely related to the treatment of chronic urticarial by Jingfang Mixture, mainly involved in the glutamate metabolism, taurine and hypotaurine metabolism, arginine and proline metabolism, arachidonic acid metabolism, tricarboxylic acid cycle, unsaturated fatty acid biosynthesis, glutathione metabolism, phenylalanine metabolism, alanine, aspartic acid, and glutamate metabolism, and butyric acid metabolism. Glutamate metabolism and butyric acid metabolism involved more metabolic pathways than others. Therefore, it was speculated that Jingfang Mixture had a balanced regulating effect on the related metabolic pathways which caused the serum disorder in the rats with urticaria, and tended to regulate the metabolic differential to the normal level in the rats with urticaria. This paper provides references for studying the mechanism of Jingfang Mixture from the perspective of endogenous metabolites and metabolic pathways in vivo. At the same time, the endogenous substances explored in this paper can be used as important biomarkers for the prevention of urticaria.
Keywords: Jingfang Mixture; chronic urticaria; endogenous metabolites; metabonomics; pathway analysis.