Introduction Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which originated in ancient China and has been developed for thousands of years, is widely used in China and the west nowadays as a part of complementary and alternative medicine. In order to advance the modernization of TCM, more evidence of the efficacy and pharmacological mechanisms at molecular level is still necessary for better understanding of TCM. The microarray technology can provide deep insights into the mechanisms of action at

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... ptional level and is successfully applied to drug discovery and development. Based on gene expression data, a number of genes/ targets, for which the expression levels significantly changed between the biological states before and after treatment by TCM in vivo or in vitro, can be identified by various statistical algorithms and used to interpret complex therapeutic effects of TCM. Moreover, the network-based approaches have recently been proposed to systematically investigate the molecular mechanisms of TCM from a systematic point of view. This paper reviewed the TCM researches based on the microarray data as well