This report is a review of the literature of marine natural product chemistry for 1995. Earlier reports published in this journal cover the period from 1977 to December 1994. For the first time during this series of reviews, the number of new marine natural products and papers describing them appear to have decreased during the past year. The format for this review is identical to that of the last reports in which compounds from cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae) were included in the section on marine microorganisms and phytoplankton. The review concentrates on reports of novel marine natural products with interesting biological and pharmaceutical properties, omitting biochemical studies involving marine organisms, reports of primary metabolites, research on the biosynthesis of marine natural products (reviewed in detail elsewhere), papers detailing pharmacological studies, syntheses using marine natural products simply as a vehicle to illustrate the potential of a specific reaction, the patent literature, and conference abstracts. In addition to a plethora of articles in scientific and popular magazines, several reviews of broad interest appeared during 1995, including those on cultured marine microorganisms, marine fungi, West Indian gorgonian octacorals, echinoderm chemical constituents, bryozoan secondary metabolites and their chemical ecology, marine sesquiterpene/quinones, structurally similar natural products in phylogenetically distant marine organisms, a personal review on marine natural products research, an overview of opistobranch mollusc natural products, and a meeting report on the 1994 Japan-US Seminar on Bioorganic Marine Chemistry.