Daphniphyllum alkaloids are a structurally diverse group of natural products with high complex poly-cyclic skeletons. These unusual systems have attracted great interest as challenging targets for total synthesis and biosynthetic studies. The last review on this class of alkaloids covering the reports on Daph-niphyllum alkaloids that have been published between 1987 and 2002 was reported by Kobayashi and Morita. Since then, more than sixty new alkaloids from eleven species of Daphniphyllum have been reported, and nearly two thirds of them were isolated from the Chinese species of Daphniphyllum distributed in China by Chinese researchers. Some of them belong to the known framework, but others are completely new. This review focuses the structural classification, plausible biosynthesis and biological activity of these new Daphniphyllum alkaloids. Classification of the alkaloids basically follows that of the previous reviews, but the newly found 7 skeletons have been added. The structural characters and biogenetic relationships of the major group of Daphniphyllum alkaloids were also discussed.

Key words: alkaloid, biosynthesis, structure classfication, biological activity, daphniphyllaceae