OBJECTIVE  To study the anti-ulcerative colitis(UC) effect of Sargentodoxae Caulis and explore its mechanism.

METHODS  The UC mice model induced by dextran sodium sulfate was used to evaluate the anti-UC effect of Sargentodoxae Caulis. The ingredients of Sargentodoxae Caulis were obtained according to the CNKI and PubMed website, component targets were screened by SwissTargetPrediction database, GEO gene chip was used to extract UC differential genes, then a network of "ingredients-targets-disease" of the Sargentodoxae Caulis was constructed. After screening the core targets, protein interaction and cluster analysis, biological process and pathway enrichment analysis were performed, and the reliability of network analysis was preliminarily verified by molecular docking and literatures.

RESULTS  Sargentodoxae Caulis could significantly improve the disease activity index score, colon shortening and colonic histopathological changes of UC mice, and had a good anti-UC effect. The network analysis found that the core components of the anti-UC of Sargentodoxae Caulis include (+)-Dihydroxyurearetic acid, Isorhaponigenin and Pinosylvin, and 63 core targets, such as EGFR, STAT1 and LCK, regulating PI3K-Akt signal pathway and cancer proteoglycan and other related signal pathways of immune anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer, and it could affect the biological processes such as amino acid modification, kinase activity regulation, cell reaction and oxidative stress to treat UC. Molecular docking and literature showed that the constructed network had high reliability.

CONCLUSION  Sargentodoxae Caulis has a good anti-UC effect, and its mechanism may be closely related to the regulation of intestinal immune inflammation and cell proliferation, differentiation and migration. It has the characteristics of multi-component, multi-target and multi-way.