The application of metabolomics in investigating anti-diabetic activity of medicinal plants

Diabetes mellitus is the most prevalent endocrine disease in the world and is likely to be the major epidemic in human history. In current years, many modern anti-diabetic medicines have been produced and introduced into the markets, however, long-term treatment of diabetes using synthetic drugs is limited. Medicinal plants play a great role in the treatment of diabetes. Many medicinal plants and their related traditional treatments for diabetes are used throughout the world and represent promising alternatives for the management of diabetes treatment. Metabolomics researches on diabetes have contributed to many aspects of exploring biomarkers and understanding the progression of the disease at metabolic levels. In addition, in the last decade, a number of metabolomics studies have focused on investigating the action mechanism of various herbal medicines. This paper aims to highlight and review a series of metabolomics studies that carried out on the role of herbal medicines on obesity and diabetes, finding potential biomarkers and also characterizing the metabolic disturbances associated with diabetes development. The findings showed that the metabolism of glycolysis/gluconeogenesis (glucose, pyruvate, lactate), TCA cycle (succinate, citrate, beta-hydroxybutyrate, 2-oxoglutarate), lipid metabolism (acetoacetate, acetate) and amino acid metabolic pathways (valine, leucine, and isoleucine, hippurate, creatine) were more significantly disturbed metabolic pathways and biomarkers in diabetic models and herbal medicines affect these metabolic pathways by different mechanisms.