ABSTRACT
Marine natural products are a significant and important source for new small molecule drug leads. In most cases, marine natural products have unique structure skeletons and stereo complexity. Their absolute configurations and biologically activities are closely related, which highlights the importance of absolute configurational assignment. The stereo-configurational evaluation of marine natural products is one of the most difficulties in determining natural structure, and also very important contents of natural products research. In this review we summarized a variety of cases with different structural types that often dictate some valuable approach to configurational assignment. Hopefully, the selected case studies could provide some inspiration to a readership with broad interests: natural products chemists and synthetic organic chemists.