NMR-Based Metabolomic Analysis of Spatial Variation in Soft Corals

Marine Drugs

Qing He⁴  Ruiqi Sun⁴  Huijuan Liu⁵  Zhufeng Geng⁶  Dawei Chen³  Yinping Li⁴  Jiao Han⁴  Wenhan Lin¹  Shushan Du² 

[1] State Key Laboratory of Natural and Biomimetic Drugs, Peking University, Beijing 100083, China; E-Mail:;State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China; E-Mail:;China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment, Beijing 100022, China; E-Mail:;College of Chemistry, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China; E-Mails:;Beijing Forensic Science Institute, Beijing 100875, China; E-Mail:;Analytic and Testing Center, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China; E-Mail:

关键词: soft coral;    NMR spectroscopy;    chemometrics;    spatial variation;   

DOI  :  10.3390/md12041876

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.