Yue-Wei Guo
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Nat Prod Chem Res
Natural products have played a significant role in the drug discovery process throughout the last hundreds years. What is the best strategy to investigate the biological potentialities of secondary metabolites? It is generally accepted that there are two ways to explore the pharmaceutical potentialities of natural products. The first way is so called bioassay guided isolation of bioactive natural products; the second one is so called random screening methodology. In fact, every procedure could be only partially satisfactory. Apart from the above mentioned two solutions, an alternative way could be a good choice through studying the compounds that really play a biological role in the organism where they are present. This could be the starting point to discover other biological potentialities. Of course, to perform studies like these, one needs a careful selection of promising biological systems and also the close collaboration among chemists, biologists and pharmacologists. Trying to follow this bio-chemical approach, some years ago we started to investigate marine nudibranchs that are extremely interesting from an ecological point of view. In fact, these mollusks are completely devoid of the mechanical protection of the shell. But, in spite of this apparent vulnerability, they are rarely victims of predators. This is due to a series of defensive strategies that include the use of chemicals that either derive from their food habits or are biosynthesized ??de novo? by themselves. In this lecture, we will report the recent chemical studies on opisthobranch molluscs collected from South China Sea. All work has been performed in close collaboration with marine biologists who have correctly submitted the biological problems to the chemical analysis, and with pharmacologists who have carried out bioassay based on the clue provided through chemoecology studies. ywguo@simm.ac.cn
