Sargassum naozhouense is a brown seaweed used in folk medicine and applied for thousands of years in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, China. This study is the first time to investigate its chemical composition and antiviral activity. On the dry weight basis, this seaweed was constituted of ca. 35.18% ash, 11.20% protein, 1.06% lipid and 47.73% total carbohydrate, and the main carbohydrate was water-soluble polysaccharide. The protein analysis indicated the presence of essential amino acids, which accounted for 36.35% of the protein. The most abundant fatty acids were C14:0, C16:0, C18:1 and C20:4. The ash fraction analysis indicated that essential minerals and trace elements, such as Fe, Zn and Cu, were present in the seaweed. IR analysis revealed that polysaccharides from cultivated S. naozhouense may be alginates and fucoidan. The polysaccharides possessed strong antiviral activity against HSV-1 in vitro with EC₅₀ of 8.92 μg/mL. These results demonstrated cultivated S. naozhouense has a potential for its use in functional foods and antiviral new drugs.

Azaphilones have continuously aroused considerable attention owing to their structural diversity and significant biological activities recently. This review attempts to give a comprehensive summary of recent progress on the isolation, identification, and biological activity, along with synthetic and biosynthetic studies of azaphilones reported from October 2012 to December 2019. Herein, a total of 252 compounds predominantly originated from 32 genera of fungi, such as Penicillium (20%) and Talaromyces (11%), were included in this research with citations of 105 references. Among these azaphilones, approximately half of them were found with various biological activities, of which over 40% displayed cytotoxic/anti-tumor effects. This review would shed light on the future development and research of azaphilones.

Nitrobenzoyl sesquiterpenoids are rare in natural sources, and fungi Aspergillus species are the only sources of them. A new nitrobenzoyl sesquiterpenoid, 6β,9α-dihydroxy-14-p-nitrobenzoylcinnamolide (1), and a known analogue, insulicolide A (2), were isolated from extracts of the culture of marine-derived fungus Aspergillus ochraceus Jcma1F17, which was identified by morphological and ITS phylogenetic analyses. The structures were determined by NMR, MS, CD, and optical rotation analyses. Both nitrobenzoyl sesquiterpenoids displayed significant cytotoxicities against 10 cancer cell lines, and the new one (1) also showed antiviral activities against H3N2 and EV71. This is the first time that nitrobenzoyl sesquiterpenoids from A. ochraceus have been reported.