Biology; technology
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is one of the most distinctive disciplines in the natural science field in China. The modernization of traditional Chinese medicine is to combine the advantages and characteristics of traditional Chinese medicine with modern science and technology to promote the internationalization of traditional Chinese medicine.
Biotechnology, as a high-tech that combines life science with many modern scientific theories and research methods, is widely used in the production of modern Chinese medicine.
1。 Sustainable utilization technology of Chinese herbal medicine resources
The premise of producing modern Chinese medicine with international competitiveness is to have high-quality Chinese medicine raw materials.
Modern Chinese medicine must strictly ensure that the raw materials used are pollution-free, the contents of pesticide residues and heavy metals are in a very safe range, the contents of effective substances are stable and reliable, and strict quality standards are formulated.
The resources of traditional Chinese medicine in China reach 1. There are more than 20,000 kinds of Chinese herbal medicines, some of which involve rare and endangered species, which need urgent rescue, protection and rational utilization.
Migrating rare and endangered animals and plants to feeding grounds and botanical gardens is an important method to protect species. It is of great significance to establish the corresponding gene bank for preserving the genes of animals and plants and investigating the variation of species.
As far as the cultivation of Chinese herbal medicines is concerned, the implementation of GAP has become industry knowledge.
Gene technology is gradually playing an important role in this respect, such as the breeding of excellent varieties of Chinese medicinal materials, the analysis of genetic characteristics of authentic medicinal materials, and transgenic insect-resistant medicinal plants.
The differences of Atractylodes lancea between the north and the south were analyzed by RAPD, and it was considered that the authenticity of Atractylodes lancea was a group with stable differences in genetic and chemical components under the long-term complex effects of genetic and ecological factors. Ping Li et al. analyzed the genuineness of Lonicera japonica by using the variation of 5sRNA gene sequence.
It is reported that transgenic plants can produce products encoded by exogenous genes (such as α -arsine and interferon). With the improvement of expression efficiency and the continuous expansion of recipient plants, it will be possible to add useful new genetic characteristics to traditional Chinese herbal medicines and increase plant disease resistance, which will lay a good foundation for the green cultivation of Chinese herbal medicines.
2。 cell engineering
As the material basis of traditional Chinese medicine and natural medicine, the content of natural effective components is often very low, while the reserves of natural wild resources are declining with the development and utilization of drugs. Whether the source of raw materials can meet the needs of large-scale production is a major problem faced by the development of all natural innovative drugs, and it is also a bottleneck for the wide application and internationalization of high-level Chinese medicine.
Therefore, the development and production technology of artificial resources of traditional Chinese medicine for producing specific effective components or components have attracted great attention of researchers.
In order to make rational use of its resources, some rare and endangered species can be rapidly propagated by biotechnology, and the speed and law of individual regeneration under natural or artificial control conditions, such as rapid propagation of Dendrobium in vitro, can be studied.
Fermentation engineering uses the rapid proliferation of biological cells to produce secondary metabolites under artificial conditions, which provides a technical platform for the production of artificial resources.
At present, the mycelium and products produced by Cordyceps sinensis fermentation have formed industrial scale, and the corresponding downstream products sell well.
Using microorganisms, plant and animal cells as reactors to produce and process natural active substances has also attracted great interest of researchers. The research and development of biotransformation and biosynthesis of natural products promoted by this has attracted more and more attention from more scientific research and production departments in China.
Xu Jianfeng et al. used Rhodiola sachalinensis cultured cells to biotransform exogenous tyrosol to produce salidroside.
As a natural anticancer drug with unique mechanism of action, paclitaxel has been widely concerned since its discovery, but its content in Taxus chinensis is extremely low, and the growth of Taxus chinensis is slow and the resources are scarce, which seriously limits the further development and application of paclitaxel.
Therefore, in recent years, scientists all over the world have done a lot of work in finding and expanding the source of paclitaxel.
Gan et al. reviewed the research on paclitaxel, and the research contents reflected in the two reviews can be regarded as solving the resource problem of paclitaxel.
Scientists all over the world have studied resources in many ways, such as screening high-yield Taxus species, microbial biosynthesis, chemical synthesis, exploring biosynthetic pathways, and discovering key enzymes and their gene expression in biosynthesis, among which biosynthesis and biotransformation technologies play an extremely important role.
3。 enzyme engineering
As far as the single natural active ingredient with definite curative effect is concerned, it is the goal that people pursue to obtain a single product with complex natural structure through industrial production. However, natural compounds have complex structures and usually have many asymmetric carbon atoms, which makes the synthesis difficult or harsh. Enzyme engineering provides a new way to obtain these components.
For example, Dong-Suk Kim and others transformed the main saponin components in ginseng into ginsenoside Rh2 with a content of only a few parts per hundred thousand, and reached the production scale of 30kg per month.
4。 Application of biotechnology in quality evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine
Traditional Chinese medicine is developed by traditional Chinese medicine, and the basic quality standards can't be controlled, so the future research and development are rootless, and the formulation of its quality standards is meaningless.
The quality control of Chinese herbal medicines should mainly include two aspects. One is variety control, which mainly solves the problem of authenticity.
Secondly, the effective substance of Chinese herbal medicine is secondary metabolites, and its accumulation is mainly related to the expression and expression of key enzymes in its synthesis.
Therefore, it is particularly important to establish a reasonable production and quality evaluation system for the modernization of Chinese herbal medicines.
The application of gene molecular marker technology in the quality evaluation of traditional Chinese medicine has promoted the transformation of identification method of traditional Chinese medicine from traditional morphological characteristics analysis to biological genetic material analysis.
At present, the molecular identification of traditional Chinese medicine mainly includes the following aspects: (1) DNA molecular marker technology based on PCR, such as RAPD and AFLP(2) DNA molecular marker technology based on molecular hybridization, such as RFLP；; (3) Molecular marker techniques based on DNA sequence analysis, such as DNA direct sequencing method and PCRFLP method.
Using these gene identification methods is of great significance for understanding and analyzing the genetic characteristics of medicinal animals (plants) and the correlation between genes and the source of medicinal materials and the accumulation of compounds.
5。 Application of biotechnology in the research of new Chinese medicine
The research and development of new Chinese medicine is the key to the modernization and internationalization of Chinese medicine. It is imperative to apply modern advanced science and technology to develop modern traditional chinese medicine in line with international standards and norms.
(1) biochip provides a basis for the study of molecular mechanism of new Chinese medicine: Chinese medicine identification gene chip can identify the origin and quality of Chinese medicine; We can find out the molecular mechanism of traditional Chinese medicine and screen out the effective components of traditional Chinese medicine.
(2) Biotransformation and combinatorial chemistry provide new ideas and methods for discovering new drugs with natural active ingredients as lead compounds: Biotransformation technology can make up for the deficiency of chemical synthesis. During the period of 1997, Khmelnitsky successfully synthesized a series of taxol derivatives in organic phase by activating biocatalyst lipase with salt.
Therefore, biotransformation technology is of great significance for developing innovative drugs based on natural active ingredients.
(3) Biotechnology provides a new technical platform for the production of natural trace active ingredients: the research and development of trace active ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine has always been the core problem that puzzles the pharmaceutical industry. Through directional biotransformation technology, the high-content components in natural medicines can be converted into trace active components, thus greatly increasing the content of trace active components to meet the requirements of industrialization.
For example, it is found that many microorganisms can directionally convert high content of camptothecin into 10 hydroxycamptothecin.
Ding Jiayi et al. successfully realized the biosynthesis of natural arbutin by using hairy roots of ginseng.
(4) Structural modification of active compounds with complex natural structures by biotechnology: There is still a problem in the research and development of natural active ingredients, that is, the pharmacological activities of natural active ingredients are often quite different in vitro and in vivo, and one of the important factors is poor absorption in vivo, resulting in low bioavailability.
Using biotechnology to modify the structure of active compounds with complex natural structure is of great significance for improving the bioavailability of such components and further realizing industrial development.
To sum up, biotechnology has penetrated into all fields of Chinese medicine research and development. Although most of the research is still in its infancy, its influence is constantly expanding, and its potential social value and economic benefits are increasingly valued. Biotechnology will permeate all aspects of the development of new Chinese medicine.
Correctly applying modern biotechnology to solve the important problems in the modern scientific research and industrial development of traditional Chinese medicine will certainly promote the modernization and internationalization of traditional Chinese medicine in China and inject vitality into the international competition of our national industry after China's entry into WTO.
refer to
[1] Zhu Gejin, Lai. Application Progress of Modern Biotechnology in Modernization of Traditional Chinese Medicine, paper net, 2008, 10.
[2] Guo Lanping, Huang Luqi, etc. Preliminary study on RAPD analysis and classification of Atractylodes [J]. China Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 200 1, 32 (9)