Taking the complex composition of herbs into consideration, many biomolecular might be the potential targets for many herbs. A strategy was implemented there to define targets for Hot herbs, Cold herbs and both Cold/Hot herbs. For each target, the counts of Cold/Hot herbs targeting on it were normalized on the total amount of Cold/Hot herbs and the ratio of the normalized counts of Cold/Hot herbs was used to divided targets into three groups, including targets of Hot herbs, targets of Cold herbs and shared targets. For Cold/Hot ZHENG CG, the biological network was constructed by the seeds genes with VIP value larger than 1 and DEGs in both CSG and CAG. Node side of each seeds gene depended on the VIP value. Besides, the biological networks for the targets of Cold/Hot herbs were constructed by the unions of targets of Cold/Hot herbs, respectively and seeds genes with VIP value larger than 1. All the gene–gene interactions in these networks were collected from STRING database [73].
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