Advance in Methods of Identifying and Verifying Targets of Natural Products

Drug target discovery and validation is a key point in the process of new drug research and development, which is of original innovation for drug discovery. Natural products are important sources of drug development. It will not only provide a new strategy for the clinical prevention and treatment, but also provide some references for further exploration of functional characteristics and molecular mechanism of Chinese herbal medicine to identify the targets of natural products. With the development of life sciences and informatics, various methods for the identification of drug targets are developed. More and more targets of natural targets have been identified with the application of bioinformatics, proteomics, affinity chromatography, network pharmacology, drug stability of affinity, chip technology, gene knockout and RNA interference etc. Therefore, in this article, we review the related advances for recent five years to give some reference.