Burgeoning research into marine natural products during the past two decades has in no small measure been due to an heightened and world-wide interest in the ocean, to the development of new sophisticated computer-driven instrumentation, and to major advances in separation science. Organic chemists have been fully aware that processes in living systems occur in an aqueous medium. Nevertheless, the chemists who have specialized in the study of small molecules have found it expedient to use organic rather than aqueous solvents for the isolation and manipulation of secondary metabolites. The...

The present series, "Bio-organic Marine Chemistry," is being launched at a time when we have the fundamental knowledge and the requisite instrumentation to probe the molecular basis of many biological phenomena. The final volume of "Marine Natural Products-Chemical and Biological Perspectives" (Academic Press), which may be con sidered the precursor of this series, was published in 1983. In that series, which I edited, primary emphasis was placed on molecular structure and phyletic relationships. This focus was compatible with the major concerns of a growing research community in the field of...

The first three chapters of Vol. 3 of Bio-organic Marine Chemistry deal with the chemistry and function of peptides. Chapter 1 by Ireland and coworkers serves as an introduction to marine-derived peptides. It is arranged phyletically and encompasses the entire range from dipeptides to a compound with 95 amino acid residues. Peptides involved in primary metabolism and hence belonging to the realm of macromolecular biochemistry are excluded. However, it might be mentioned in passing that the dividing line between large and small molecule chemistry is continually becoming less distinct. Not only...

The contributions in this Volume, the fourth in the series Bioorganic Marine Chemistry, encompass topics which are of current concern and highlight the on-going evolution in this area of research. The growing importance of long-chain polyethers with their remarkable biological properties could not be foreseen in 1981, when the first marine representative of this class of compounds, okadaic acid, was described. Since then, the Gulf to Mexico red tide agents, the brevetoxins, and a ciguatera-causing compound, ciguatoxin, among others, have been structurally defined. Uemura, who has been...

Volumes five and six of Bioorganic Marine Chemistry differ from their predecessors in two respects - they deal exclusively with labor atory synthesis of marine natural products and they represent the effort of a single author and his associates. The rationale for these departures is readily perceived. For several decades organic synthesis has without doubt been the most spectacular branch of organic chemistry. While the late R.B. Woodward's dictum - organic compounds can undergo only four basic reactions: they can gain electrons; they can lose electrons; they can be transformed with acid or...

Volumes five and six of Bioorganic Marine Chemistry differ from their predecessors in two respects - they deal exclusively with laboratory synthesis of marine natural products and they represent the effort of a single author and his associates. The rationale for these departures is readily perceived. For several decades organic synthesis has without doubt been the most spectacular branch of organic chemistry. While the late R.B. Woodward's dictum - organic compounds can undergo only four basic reactions: they can gain electrons; they can lose electrons; they can be transformed with acid or...