Wide Identification of the Compounds in Licorice and Exploration of the Mechanism for Prostatitis Treatment by Combining UHPLC-LTQ-Orbitrap MS with Network Pharmacology

Licorice has been used as an important herbal medicine for treating chronic diseases in Asian countries for thousands of years. In this study, UHPLC-LTQ-Orbitrap MS was used to widely identify the compounds of licorices from Glycyrrhiza uralensis (Gu) and G. inflata (Gi) species by the methods of untargeted and targeted metabolomics and systemically predicted the mechanism in treating prostatitis. As a result, 91 compounds were successfully identified and most compounds showed remarkable difference between Gu and Gi samples. Multivariate statistics further demonstrated that the Gu samples were significantly discriminated from the Gi samples in the content level of main compounds. Interestingly, we also found that those compounds had two main accumulation patterns in licorice. Network pharmacology analysis predicted that those compounds in licorice interacted with a wide of targets in body and interrupted prostatitis by 17 key targets. This study would be of significance to the study on quality control and development of licorice-related products and offer a scientific basis for exploring the mechanism of treating prostatitis.