To explore the effect of Xiaoyan Decoction, a classic prescription of strengtheing the body, removing blood stasis and detoxifying, on the protein expression profile characteristics of human lung adenocarcinoma cells, and to analyze the differentially expressed signaling pathways using bioinformatics enrichment.

Human lung adenocarcinoma A549 cells were treated with Xiaoyan Decoction, total proteins were extracted from the cells of control group and Xiaoyan Decoction, and the differentially expressed proteins were screened by label-free quantitative proteomics. The differentially expressed proteins and signaling pathways were enriched by applying Gene Ontology (GO) database and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database, and the differentially expressed proteins were verified by Western blot.

Compared with the control group, among the 1 217 differentially expressed proteins, 384 up-regulated proteins and 833 down-regulated proteins were identified in Xiaoyan Decoction group. The GO analysis revealed that the differentially expressed proteins were involved in translation, mRNA splicing, metabolism and other biological processes, and the KEGG database analysis showed that the differentially expressed proteins were mainly involved in the top 20 signaling pathways, with the most significant up-regulation of the ribosomal pathway and the most significant down-regulation of the RNA spliceosome and MAPK pathways. The differentially expressed proteins involved in the tumor were closely related to the MAPK pathway. The results of western blot showed that compared with the control group, PKA, GRB2, and ERK protein expression was significantly down-regulated in the Xiaoyan Decoction group (t=9.913, 9.641, 20.060, all P<0.05), and the results were consistent with the proteomic results.

The effect of Xiaoyan Decoction on lung adenocarcinoma may be realized by inhibiting RNA splicing related signaling pathway and MAPK pathway.