Abstract
The review is devoted to the chemical diversity of steroids produced by soft corals and their determined and potential activities. There are about 200 steroids that belong to different types of steroids such as secosteroids, spirosteroids, epoxy- and peroxy-steroids, steroid glycosides, halogenated steroids, polyoxygenated steroids and steroids containing sulfur or nitrogen heteroatoms. Of greatest interest is the pharmacological activity of these steroids. More than 40 steroids exhibit antitumor and related activity with a confidence level of over 90 percent. A group of 32 steroids shows anti-hypercholesterolemic activity with over 90 percent confidence. Ten steroids exhibit anti-inflammatory activity and 20 steroids can be classified as respiratory analeptic drugs. Several steroids exhibit rather rare and very specific activities. Steroids exhibit anti-osteoporotic properties and can be used to treat osteoporosis, as well as have strong anti-eczemic and anti-psoriatic properties and antispasmodic properties. Thus, this review is probably the first and exclusive to present the known as well as the potential pharmacological activities of 200 marine steroids.
Highlights
Soft corals belong to the order of Alcyonacea, formerly known as gorgonians [1,2] living in all the oceans of the world, especially in the tropics and subtropics
Soft corals produce more than 5800 secondary metabolites [5], including rare and unusual fatty acids [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], terpenoids [14,15,16], quinones [17], alkaloids [18,19,20,21,22,23], glycosides [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31] and steroids [18,32,33,34,35,36,37]
The biological activity of many steroids has not been determined and we present the pharmacological activities detected experimentally and predicted based on the structure-activity relationships using the PASS (Prediction of Activity Spectra for Substances) software
Summary
Soft corals belong to the order of Alcyonacea (class Octocorallia, Anthozoa, Cnidaria), formerly known as gorgonians [1,2] living in all the oceans of the world, especially in the tropics and subtropics. It is known that many secondary metabolites isolated from marine invertebrates including soft corals, exhibit anticancer and other pharmacological activities [38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45]. We will look at rare and unusual steroids isolated from soft corals belonging to the order of Alcyonacea. Probability of belonging to the class of “actives” Pa is calculated for each activity, providing the assessment of the hidden pharmacological potential of the investigated soft coral steroids [42]. 2 of assessment of the hidden pharmacological potential of the investigated soft coral steroids [42]
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