The Screening Research of NF-?B Inhibitors from Moutan Cortex Based on Bioactivity-Integrated UPLC-Q/TOF-MS

Lu, Yujie; Liu, Wenjuan; Zhang, Man; Deng, Yanfang; Jiang, Min; Bai, Gang

Moutan Cortex (MC) is the dried root cortex of Paeonia suffruticosa Andrews and commonly used for removing blood stasis, dredging meridian, expelling pus, and eliminating inflammation in TCM prescriptions [6, 7] . Some pharmacological studies have showed that MC could inhibit the production of NO and tumor necrosis factor-(TNF-) induced by lipopolysaccharide/recombinant interferon-(LPS/rIFN-) [8] . In animal experiments, MC could significantly decrease the level of cytokines including interleukin-1 (IL-1), macrophage inflammatory peptide-2 (MIP-2), IL-6, and IL-10, which apparently inhibited LPS-induced acute lung injury in rat models [9] . Available evidence revealed that MC had the potential NF-B inhibitory activity and clinical anti-inflammatory efficacy; however, previous studies primarily focused on the single component, and the integral 2 Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine active components and their mechanisms of action have not yet been fully clear. Therefore, we mainly conducted a systematic study of the potential NF-B inhibitors in MC.