MECHANISM-BASED ISOLATION AND STRUCTURE OF SOME ANTICANCER ACTIVE NATURAL-PRODUCTS

Application of a mechanism-based anticancer bioassay employing DNA rep air-or recombination-deficient mutants of the yeast Saccharomyces cere visiae for screening and subsequent bioassay-guided fractionation of b ioactive higher plant and bryophyte extracts led to the isolation of a variety of natural products with potential anticancer activity. Prese nted herein are interesting structural features of some representative examples of natural products active in our mechanism-based bioassay a nd cytotoxicity assays along with structure-activity relationships of synthetic analogs of some of them.