Salinosporamide A was discovered by William Fenical and Paul Jensen from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA. In preliminary screening, a high percentage of the organic extracts of cultured Salinispora strains possessed antibiotic and anticancer activities, which suggests that these bacteria are an excellent resource for drug discovery. Salinispora strain CNB-392 was isolated from a heat-treated marine sediment sample and cytotoxicity-guided fractionation of the crude extract led to the isolation of salinosporamide A. Although salinosporamide A shares an identical bicyclic ring structure with omuralide, it is uniquely functionalized. Salinosporamide A displayed potent in vitro cytotoxicity against HCT-116 human colon carcinoma with an IC50 value of 11 ng mL-1. This compound also displayed potent and highly selective activity in the NCI's 60-cell-line panel with a mean GI50 value (the concentration required to achieve 50% growth inhibition) of less than 10 nM and a greater than 4 log LC50 differential between resistant and susceptible cell lines. The greatest potency was observed against NCI-H226 non-small cell lung cancer, SF-539 brain tumor, SK-MEL-28 melanoma, and MDA-MB-435 melanoma (formerly misclassified as breast cancer), all with LC50 values less than 10 nM. Salinosporamide A was tested for its effects on proteasome function because of its structural relationship to omuralide. When tested against purified 20S proteasome, salinosporamide A inhibited proteasomal chymotrypsin-like proteolytic activity with an IC50 value of 1.3 nM. This compound is approximately 35 times more potent than omuralide which was tested as a positive control in the same assay. Thus, the unique functionalization of the core bicyclic ring structure of salinosporamide A appears to have resulted in a molecule that is a significantly more potent proteasome inhibitor than omuralide.