抄録
The ocean is a treasure chest of novel natural products. Among various producers of such natural products, marine microorganisms are especially interesting and useful from several points of view including a potential for industrial applications. Under such circumstances, we have been conducting studies in order to establish highly efficient systems to select useful substances from marine microbial products.
Two examples of our achievements in development and establishment of instrumental systems for screening and analysis of natural products are reported herein.
One of the examples is a screening system based upon the combined information on retention time, and spectra of UV absorption and mass spectrometry provided by an HPLC with photo-diode-array-detector and a mass spectroscope used in conjunction. A novel anti-cancer antibiotic, pelagiomicin, and known substances such as sterigmatocystin, prodigiosin, and quinolone are some of the substances selected by the system.
The other example is a newly established LC-MS system to analyze very sensitively all the types of isoplenoid quinones with simple operations. The system provides very useful information for identification of microorganisms and has enabled a new approach to investigate occurrence pattern of the types of microbes selected by our screening systems.
