Marine Natural Products

From the reviews:

"The search for marine natural products is well-known for colorful pictures of exotic creatures which, after having been found to contain the cure for cancer, disappear into the depths, never to be seen again, or for accounts of scuba-diving chemists in waters alive with poisonous sea snakes - in short, the sort of sensational stuff that even nonchemists find interesting. That sort of thing will not be found in this book. This is not to say it will be uninteresting to organic chemists since it deals with some exciting current topics in natural products and synthetic organic chemistry.
This slim, nicely bound volume consists of a series of well-organized and up-to-date chapters by several young Japanese chemists, many of them at Tohoku University in Sendai, who specialize in marine natural products. The overall theme of this volume can be stated to be total synthesis, as five of the eight chapters deal with this topic... As is pointed out in thePreface to the series, 50% of all molecules listed in Chemical Abstracts can be considered heterocyclic, and since heterocycles are, if anything, even more common among marine natural products, one has to set limits. Because of this, some of the more important heterocyclic marine natural products such as diazonamide A, the cephalostatins, spongistatin 1, or salinosporamide A are not even mentioned in this book. Nevertheless, this book represents a valuable and timely resource, which is expected to be especially useful to graduate students, and should be included in all scientific libraries." (Jose-Luis Giner, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol. 129 (15), 2007)