【Major Papers of the Laboratory】
・Okinawan Subtropical Plants as a Promising Resource for Novel Chemical Treasury, CHEMICAL & PHARMACEUTICAL BULLETIN, 66(5), 519-526, 201805
・Myrseguinosides A-E, Five New Glycosides from the Fruits of Myrsine seguinii, CHEMICAL & PHARMACEUTICAL BULLETIN, 59(10), 1274-1280, 20111001
・Reinvestigation of the Absolute Stereochemistry of Megastigmane Glucoside, Icariside B-5, CHEMICAL & PHARMACEUTICAL BULLETIN, 58(10), 1399-1402, 201010

【Education】
　Pharmacognosy is one of the bases of pharmaceutical sciences. Our aim is to isolate and elucidate new potentially useful compounds from natural resources, such as tropical and sub-tropical plants, marine invertebrates and bacterial and fungal metabolites.
　Crude extracts possessing medicinal usefulness are subjected to bioactivity-guided fractionation by variety of chromatographic techniques. The structures of the isolated compounds are then elucidated by spectroscopic analyses, such as 1D and 2D NMR, MS, IR, UV and CD spectra, together with chemical derivatization. Our members are required to obtain deep knowledge and sophisticated techniques through the above research.

【Research】
　More than half of the current drugs come from natural resources. We are interested in medicinal herbs, tropical and sub-tropical plants and microbial metabolites as important resources for drug discovery. Our research includes two major research steps. First is isolation and structural elucidation of purified compounds from crude extracts. And the next step is evaluation of biological activities of the isolated compounds, such as inhibitors against pathogenic virus, bacteria, yeast, fungi, protozoa and human cancer cells.