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Marine pharmacognosy
For many years, traditional Western pharmacognosy focused on the investigation and identification of medically important plants and animals in the terrestrial environment, although many marine organisms were used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. With the development of the open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus or SCUBA in the 1940s, some chemists turned to more pioneering work looking for new medicines in the marine environment. In the United States, the road has been long for the first FDA approval of a drug directly from the sea, but in 2004, the approval of ziconotide isolated from a marine cone snail has paved the way for other marine-derived compounds moving through clinical trials.
With 79% of the earth’s surface covered by water, research into the chemistry of marine organisms is relatively unexplored and represents a vast resource for new medicines to combat major diseases such as cancer, AIDS or malaria. Research typically focuses on sessile organisms or slow moving animals because of their inherent need for chemical defenses. Standard research involves an extraction of the organism in a suitable solvent followed by either an assay of this crude extract for a particular disease target or a rationally guided isolation of new chemical compounds using standard chromatography techniques.
== Marine organisms as sources of natural products ==
Over 70% of the earth's surface is covered by oceans which contain 95% of the earth's biosphere. It was over 3500 million years ago that organisms first appeared in the sea. Over time, they have evolved many different mechanisms to survive the various harsh environments which include extreme temperatures, salinity, pressure,different levels of aeration and radiation, overcoming effects of mutation, and combating infection, fouling and overgrowth by other organisms.〔 Adaptations to survive the different environments could be by physical or chemical adaptation. Organisms with no apparent physical defense, like sessile organisms, are believed to have evolved chemical defenses to protect themselves.〔 It is also believed that the compounds would have to be extremely potent due to the dilution effect of seawater. This has been described to be analogues to pheromones but with the purpose of repelling instead of attracting.〔 As well, predators have evolved chemical weapons in order to paralyze or kill prey. ''Conus magus'' is an example of a cone snail that has a poisoned harpoon-like projectile which it uses to paralyze prey like small fish. Some organisms, like the Viperfish, are believed to attract small fish or prey by using its photophore.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.seasky.org/deep-sea/viperfish.html )〕
Many different marine organisms have been explored for bioactive compounds. Some vertebrate animals include fish, sharks and snakes. Some examples of invertebrates are sponges, coelenterates, tunicates, echinoderms, corals, algae, molluscs and bryozoans. Some microorganisms include bacteria, fungi and cyanobacteria.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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