Chemical and Biological Diversity in Nephthea Soft Corals in the Current Decade: A Review

Marine natural products play an important role within the innovation of lead compounds for drug development. The soft coral genus Nephthea has proven to be a treasurable source to discover new natural products with biological potentials. This review provides a survey of all metabolites isolated from the genus Nephthea in the current decade, along with their natural sources, chemical structures and biological potentials whenever possible. The current review aimed to compare chemical and biological diversity in the soft corals genus Nephthea. We listed 54 compounds including steroids and diterpenes. The steroids are the most abundant compounds of the genus Nephthea (74 %) followed by diterpenes (20%) and miscellaneous compounds (6%). The isolated compounds from genus Nephthea in the current decade have been shown different biological activities as cytotoxic against different cancer cell lines (29 compounds), as anti-inflammatory (13 compounds), antifouling (3 compounds) and antibacterial (2 compounds).