A Survey for Alkaloids in Hawaiian Plants. I

lated and studied for over 150 years, only a small percentage of the recorded plant species have been investigated and even fewer of the isolated compounds have been carried to full elucidation of their structures. Willaman and Schubert (1955) in their valuable survey of alkaloid-containing plants state that by the end of 1952 about 950 alkaloids were isolated and named and that 1,202 plant species were known to contain alkaloids. Up to that time only about 2 per cent of all recorded plant species had been as much as tested for alkaloids. The widely varying pharmacological prop-erties of alkaloids always have been a major point of interest and have helped to attract organic chemists to this field of research. This viewpoint, however, was losing ground steadily in the face of mounting successes scored by synthetic drugs. The demonstration by Muller, Schlittler, and Bein (1952) that the alkaloid reserpine was responsible for the hypotensive action of the Indian snakeroot, Rauvolfia serpentina Benth., instilled new vigor into natural products research. As a conse-quence of this work many members of the genus Rauvolfia and related genera in the plant family Apocynaceae from all parts of the tropics have been investigated. This recent research has also prompted the chemical study of three of the reported seven Hawaiian Rauvolfia species (Gorman et al., 1957). In order to utilize plant sources for the iso-lation of alkaloids effectively it is necessary to survey a given flora, and base subsequen