Yin-Ting Wang, a master program student in the 2nd year advised by Professor Chih-Chuang Liaw, studied the chemical components of cultured Hippocampus kuda and the wild hippocampus spp. and also made the comparison of those components between the head, body and tail parts.

　Hippocampus is a traditional Chinese medicine with high economic value, which is well-known for its benefit on aphrodisiac, inducing labor and promoting blood circulation. Literature survey indicated that hippocampus extracts also have anti-inflammatory and anti-fatigue effects. Therefore, Yin-Ting divided the cultured and commercial hippocampus, individually, into three parts as head, body, and tail for extraction. Then, she evaluated the anti-inflammatory activity of all extracts and made HPLC analysis. Yin-Ting also used mass spectrometry technology to compare the composition differences in by molecular networking analysis. In the preliminary study, she found that the methanol and n-hexane layers of the wild hippocampus have significant anti-inflammatory activity and also found differences of specific HPLC signals. Besides, molecular networking analysis between different parts of the cultured and wild hippocampus also indicated that a cluster of compounds with special mass fragmentation pattern only exists in the body of wild hippocampus. In the future, we will focus on the isolation of the compounds in the cluster and confirm whether the components of this group have anti-inflammatory activity.