Abstract
Soft corals are common marine organisms that inhabit tropical and subtropical oceans. They are shown to be rich source of secondary metabolites with biological activities. In this work, soft corals from two geographical locations were investigated using 1H-NMR spectroscopy coupled with multivariate statistical analysis at the metabolic level. A partial least-squares discriminant analysis showed clear separation among extracts of soft corals grown in Sanya Bay and Weizhou Island. The specific markers that contributed to discrimination between soft corals in two origins belonged to terpenes, sterols and N-containing compounds. The satisfied precision of classification obtained indicates this approach using combined 1H-NMR and chemometrics is effective to discriminate soft corals collected in different geographical locations. The results revealed that metabolites of soft corals evidently depended on living environmental condition, which would provide valuable information for further relevant coastal marine environment evaluation.
Highlights
Soft corals refer to the marine colonial organisms in the class Octocorallia that inhabit tropical and subtropical area including South China Sea [1]
We investigated the natural variation in metabolites of soft corals from two collection sites in the South China Sea
To provide a comprehensive interpretation of the metabolites differences in soft corals according to two different geographic origins, statistical analysis was applied to 1H-NMR spectral data sets
Summary
Soft corals refer to the marine colonial organisms in the class Octocorallia that inhabit tropical and subtropical area including South China Sea [1]. The investigation of metabolites from cultured and wild-type soft coral Klyxum simplex resulted in different diterpenoids. A report on the soft coral S. flexibilis showed the metabolites of this sample were abundant in steroids with a small amount of cembranoid diterpenes which were different with previous researches. Due to the great advantages in information acquisition, NMR-based metabolomics has been used increasingly in marine environment studies. NMR-based metabolomics to assess the metabolic responses of mussels to environment pollution [12]. We investigated the natural variation in metabolites of soft corals from two collection sites in the South China Sea. The metabolic fingerprint and statistical analysis were used to find the metabolites that contribute to the differences between the two groups.
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