Abstract: Objective To summarize the application of systems biology in hepatotoxicity of TCM by reviewing related references, including the screening of toxic markers, the research of toxicity mechanisms, toxicity prediction, and the establishment of toxic protein and gene database. Methods Related references in recent years at home and abroad were collected, analyzed and summarized. Results Systems biology technology can find out the toxic substances and the law of toxicity more quickly and accurately compared to the traditional methods. It can either be applied to the study of biomarkers and drug targets independently, or to supplement and verify the study of mechanism. Meanwhile there are still some unsolved problems of its application due to technical limitation such as the lack of toxic assessment system and enough basic data. Conclusion The knowledge of toxic mechanism of TCM has been raised to a new level due to the application of systems biology, which isa suitable platform for the research on hepatotoxicity assessment, clinical diagnosis and hepatotoxicity mechanism of TCM, especially for discovering toxic markers and hepatotoxicity warning in advance.

Key words: systems biology, proteomics, genomics, metabonomics, hepatotoxicity