S. Cohen
Jan 7, 2015
Citations
1
Influential Citations
29
Citations
Journal
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
Abstract
I. Sponges and Spongonucleosides I have been interested for many years in several unusual nucleosides first isolated by the late Werner Bergmann [?, 2] from a sponge, Cryptotethya crypta. These are known by the trivial names ofspongouridine and spongothymidine and are the i-/3-D-arabinosyl derivatives of the pyrimidines uracil and thymine, respectively. Until now these substances have been detected in only a single species of sponge. The arabinosyl nucleosides are present in large amounts in the free state and are readily extractable by alcohol or acetone when the live sponge is plunged into these solvents. The arabinosyl compounds have not yet been found in the nucleic acids of Cryptotethya, which contain the normal ribonucleotides in its RNA and deoxyribonucleotides in its DNA [3]. My own interest in these unusual nucleosides stemmed initially from our studies of the biosynthesis and metabolism of both D-arablnose and various pyrimidine nucleosides as aspects of our work on the metabolism of phage-infected bacteria [4, 5]. The discovery ofthe arabinosyl nucleosides is ofsome interest to students ofcomparative biochemistry. Bergmann's major interest was in the sterols of sponges and, indeed, he has shown that these sterols differ markedly from sterols of other phyla. His method of extracting Cryptotethya with boiling acetone was designed to isolate lipids, but to his surprise large