Revealing the Underlying Mechanism of Acacia Nilotica against Asthma from a Systematic Perspective: A Network Pharmacology and Molecular Docking Study
Abstract
Acacia Nilotica (AN) has long been used as a folk cure for asthma, but little is known about
how AN could possibly modulate this disease. Thus, an in-silico molecular mechanism for AN’s antiasthmatic
action was elucidated utilizing network pharmacology and molecular docking techniques.
DPED, PubChem, Binding DB, DisGeNET, DAVID, and STRING were a few databases used to collect
network data. MOE 2015.10 software was used for molecular docking. Out of 51 searched compounds
of AN, eighteen compounds interacted with human target genes, a total of 189 compounds-related
genes, and 2096 asthma-related genes were found in public databases, with 80 overlapping genes
between them. AKT1, EGFR, VEGFA, and HSP90AB were the hub genes, whereas quercetin and
apigenin were the most active components. p13AKT and MAPK signaling pathways were found to
be the primary target of AN. Outcomes of network pharmacology and molecular docking predicted
that AN might exert its anti-asthmatic effect probably by altering the p13AKT and MAPK signaling
pathway.