Varieties of alkaloids are known to be produced by various organisms, including bacteria, fungi and plants, as secondary metabolites that exhibit useful bioactivities. However, understanding of how those metabolites are biosynthesized still remains limited, because most of these compounds are isolated from plants and at a trace level of production. In this review, we focus on recent efforts in ...

In the present paper, we report an efficient total synthesis of a marine alkaloid, rigidin E. The key tetrasubstituted 2-amino-3-carboxamidepyrrole intermediate was synthesized by cascade Michael addition/intramolecular cyclization between N-(2-(4-(benzyloxy)phenyl)-2-oxoethyl)methanesulfonamide and 3-(4-(benzyloxy)phenyl)-2-cyano-N-methylacrylamide. Subsequent carbonylation with triphosgene ca...

In recent years, a number of novel 3-alkyl pyridinium alkaloids were identified from the crude extract of the Arctic marine sponge Haliclona viscosa [1 – 5]. The material available from this sponge was limited by the small size of the individuals, their slow growth rate and the effort to sample substainably in the Arctic ecosystem. A new refinement of the spectroscopic methods led to improved r...

Two new long-chain C33 polyacetylenic compounds, halicynones A and B were isolated from the marine sponge Haliclona sp. along with known analogs. The known compound pellynol A possessing a 1-yn-3-ol terminus, exhibited strong antitumor activity against the human colon tumor cell line HCT-116 (IC50 0.026 μg/mL), however, the corresponding 1-yn-3-one, halicynone A, was inactive, which suggests an...

A simple, mild and robust method for the stereoselective synthesis of (E)-methyl α-(3-formyl-1H-indol-2-yl)-β-aryl/alkyl-substituted acrylates via a condensation reaction of methyl 2-(3-formyl-1H-indol-2-yl)acetate with several alkyl or aryl aldehydes using L-proline (25 mol%) as a catalyst is presented for the first time. In addition, completely metal free based high yielding methods for the s...

Three new compounds, enhygromic acid (1) and deoxyenhygrolides A (2) and B (3), were isolated from a marine myxobacterium, Enhygromyxa sp. Compound 1 was found to be an acrylic acid derivative with a rare polycyclic carbon skeleton, decahydroacenaphthylene, by spectroscopic analyses. Compounds 2 and 3 were deoxy analogs of the known γ-alkylidenebutenolides, enhygrolides. Compound 1 exhibited cy...