Su Jui-Hsin 1, 2, You Wan-Jing 1, 2, Liu Chih-I 3, Chao Ya-Hsuan 4
1 National Museum of Marine Biology & Aquarium, Pingtung, Taiwan
2 Graduate Institute of Marine Biology, National Dong Hwa University, Pingtung, Taiwan
3 Department of Nursing, Meiho University, Pingtung, Taiwan
4 Institute of Biomedical Science, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan
Three new cembranoids, lobophylides A–C (
1–
3), along with three known compounds (
4–
6) were isolated from the Formosan soft coral
Lobophytum sp. The structures of these compounds were elucidated by means of IR, MS and NMR techniques and comparison of the NMR data with those of known analogues. Among these natural products, compound
2 is rarely found in cembrane diterpenes possessing an isopropyl moiety with an epoxide group. Cytotoxicity study of
1–
6 against the growth of K562, Molt-4 and HL-60 cancer cell lines showed that compounds
1–
6 were not cytotoxic (IC50 > 20 μg/mL) toward the above three cancer cell lines. The in vitro anti-inflammatory effects of compounds
1–
5 were also tested. The results showed that compounds
2 and
3 significantly suppressed the accumulation of pro-inflammatory proteins, iNOS and COX-2.
