Microbial natural products represent the primary resource for drug discovery, accounting for 420 000 bioactive compounds discovered to date. 1 The majority of microbial drug discovery research has focused on actinomycetes, in particular strains of the chemically prolific genus Streptomyces. Drug discovery efforts from actinomycetes, however, have been in decline, in part because of the relatively high frequency of the isolation of known compounds. To overcome this problem, extensive attempts have been directed toward the development of effective strain selection methods to improve the efficiency of the discovery process. 2-4 Sequence-based strain selection is one of the approaches to eliminate the strains which might be studied previously. Although it is not clear whether the phylogenic novelty is associated with the production ability of new compounds, recent studies have shown the occurrence of new metabolites in Streptomyces species that have a low 16S rRNA gene sequence homology to the known species. [5][6][7] In our continuing investigation on chemical diversity within this group, 8-10 a Streptomyces strain that shared a low 16S rRNA gene identity (96.3%) with the nearest type strain for S. albus was found to produce a new catecholate derivative, catechoserine (1), along with two known biosynthetically related metabolites, N,N¢-bis (Figure 1).The producing-strain TP-A0874 was isolated from a compost sample collected in Ishikawa, Japan, and identified as a member of the genus Streptomyces by 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. The whole culture broth of strain TP-A0874 cultured in A-3M liquid medium was separated into the supernatant and the mycelium. The latter was then extracted with methanol, and the organic solvent was removed under reduced pressure. The remaining aqueous solution was combined with the supernatant and fractionated by HP-20 resin column chromatography. The fractions were further purified by reversed-phase HPLC to yield compounds 1-3.