Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (1+1)

5.1.10. Sea Hares

In the early 1970s, the extremely potent anticancer properties were reported from the extracts of sea hare Dolabella auricularia. However, due to the vanishingly small abundance of the active principle ( ∼ 1.0 mg/100 kg of collected organism), the structure elucidation of dolastatin 10 took nearly 15 years to complete. The low concentrations of dolastatin 10 in sea hares implicates a cyanobacterial diet as the origin of this bioactive secondary metabolite, and this was subsequently confirmed by direct isolation of dolastatin 10 from field collections of the marine cyanobacterium Symploca.