Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has its own theoretical basics and represents a vast and largely untapped resource for modern medicine. For example, artemisinin was screened out from an ancient TCM book for which Professor Tu Youyou won The Nobel Prize in 2015. To the best of our knowledge, there are about 2000 kinds of TCMs which are recorded or used in China, and many of them have significant clinical effects.

However, a lot of them are not well investigated, and more effort needs to be made to modernize the use of TCM. The discovery of the active material basis of TCM is quite urgent and difficult. The routine method has previously been phytochemistry combined with in vitro activity test, however this is often expensive and time-consuming. New strategies, such as component knockout, compound-activity correlation analysis, as well as metabonomics, have been put forward, which are new strategies to increase progress in the validation of TCM. The quality control of TCM is another crucial topic which has improved significantly due to the rapid progress of analytical chemistry.

The goal of this Special Issue is to introduce new strategies for the elucidation of the material basis of TCM and establish new methodologies to ensure they are quality controlled.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• New strategies for the discovery of active compounds in TCM
• Mechanism of active compounds from natural products
• New methodologies for quality control of TCM
• Pharmacokinetics
• Serum pharmacochemistry
• Metabolomics
• Traditional Chinese Medicine
• Material basis and quality control