Chinese marine materia medica (CMMM) is a vital part of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Compared with terrestrial TCM, CMMM, derived from specific marine habitats, possesses peculiar chemical components with unique structures reflecting as potent pharmacological activities, distinct drug properties and functions. Nowadays, CMMM appears to be especially effective in treating such difficult diseases as cancers, diabetes, cardio-cerebrovascular diseases, immunodeficiency diseases and senile dementia, and therefore has become an important medicinal resource for the research and development of new drugs. In recent years, such development has attracted wide attention in the field of medicine. In this study, the CMMM resources in China were systematically investigated and evaluated. It was found that the historic experiences of Chinese people using CMMM have continuously accumulated over a period of more than 3600 years, and that the achievements of the research on modern CMMM are especially outstanding. By June 2015, 725 kinds of CMMMs from Chinese coastal sea areas have been identified and recorded, covering 1552 organisms and minerals. More than 3100 traditional prescriptions containing CMMMs have been imparted and inherited. However, the number of CMMMs is less than the 8188 terrestrial TCMs, from more than 12,100 medicinal terrestrial plants, animals and minerals. In the future, the research and development of CMMM should focus on the channel entries (TCM drug properties), compatibility, effective ingredients, acting mechanisms, drug metabolism and quality standard. This study reveals the high potential of CMMM development.

Marine sponges continue to serve as a rich source of alkaloids possessing interesting biological activities and often exhibiting unique structural frameworks. In the current study, chemical investigation on the marine sponge Pericharax heteroraphis collected from the South China Sea yielded one new imidazole alkaloid named naamidine J (1) along with four known ones (2–5). Their structures were established by extensive spectroscopic methods and comparison of their data with those of the related known compounds. All the isolates possessed a central 2-aminoimidazole ring, substituted by one or two functionalized benzyl groups in some combination of the C4 and C5 positions. The cytotoxicities against selected HL-60, HeLa, A549 and K562 tumor cell lines and anti-H1N1 (Influenza a virus (IAV)) activity for the isolates were evaluated. Compounds 1 and 2 exhibited cytotoxicities against the K562 cell line with IC₅₀ values of 11.3 and 9.4 μM, respectively. Compound 5 exhibited weak anti-H1N1 (influenza a virus, IAV) activity with an inhibition ratio of 33%.

Marine sponges are well known as rich sources of biologically natural products. Growing evidence indicates that sponges harbor a wealth of microorganisms in their bodies, which are likely to be the true producers of bioactive secondary metabolites. In order to promote the study of natural product chemistry and explore the relationship between microorganisms and their sponge hosts, in this review, we give a comprehensive overview of the structures, sources, and activities of the 774 new marine natural products from sponge-derived microorganisms described over the last two decades from 1998 to 2017.