THE STRUCTURE OF ZAPOTIDINE¹

Antimutagenic Constituents of Casimiroa edulis with Potential Cancer Chemopreventive Activity

“…The Pharmacopeia of Mexico once recognized both the fruit and seed of C. edulis, with the former used as an anthelmintic and the latter as a vulnerary (Power and Callan, 1911). In previous work, the seeds of C. edulis have afforded alkaloids (Power and Callan, 1911;Aebi, 1956;Djerassi et al, 1956Djerassi et al, , 1958Kincl et al, 1956;Meisels and Sondheimer, 1957;Sondheimer and Meisels, 1958;Randolph and Friedrich, 1958;Mechoulam et al, 1961;Raman et al, 1962;Toube et al, 1967;Romero et al, 1983;Rizvi et al, 1985), coumarins (Dreyer, 1968;Enrı ´quez et al, 1984), flavonoids (Kincl et al, 1956;Dreyer and Bertelli, 1967;Garratt et al, 1967;Dreyer, 1968;Romero et al, 1983), and limonoids (Sondheimer et al, 1959;Dreyer, 1968;Murphy et al, 1968). From the bark of C. edulis, alkaloids and flavonoids were also reported as constituents (Iriarte et al, 1956;Sondheimer and Meisels, 1960).…”

Structural variety of natural products

“…A nematicidal compound isolated from the roots of African marigolds and from the flowers of the common marigold has been shown to be a-terthienyl; a closely related bithienyl occurs with this compound (46). The alkaloid zapotidine is a bicyclic derivative of thiourea (47).…”

“…Other non-amino nitrogen functional groups of natural occurrence include the nitroso group (64), aliphatic azoxy group (65, 66), nitrile (67), diazo group (47,68,69), hydroxylamine (70,77,72), and imide (73) (cf. Table 8).…”

Untitled

“…The aqueous extract of the leaves has shown anticonvulsant and sedative activities [5]. Zapotidine alkaloid [10], yet another hypotensive constituent, has been isolated from the seeds. The seed, root, and bark of C. edulis have extensively been worked up to yield histamine derivatives, such as N , N -dimethylhistamine [6], casmidine, and casimiroedin [7±9], compounds of marked hypotensive activity.…”