Small Molecules, Marine Chemical Ecology, and Drugs!

To survive and thrive, organisms interact with their world through chemistry.  This may occur on many different scales and for many distinct purposes; it is particularly important when other means of interacting with the world are not feasible.  For some organisms, such as algae and bacteria, and in some environments, such as the ocean, it is an essential mechanism.  Small molecules originating from both primary and secondary metabolism play many roles in predator-prey, host-parasite, and intraspecies interactions.  The properties of the biosynthesized compounds govern the functions that these compounds perform.  While some compounds were evolutionarily intended for one or several purposes in an ecosystem, they can be leveraged for use in other ways such as human therapeutics or bioremediation.  Understanding how these compounds produce their effect, why they are produced at all, and how they exert control on organisms, will ultimately lead to advances in their creative applications.  This dissertation proposes the examination of the ways in which small molecules drive biochemical, physiological, and ecological processes in four projects with links to both marine chemical ecology and drug discovery.  For Project 1, I will probe the antibiotic mechanism of action of a marine natural product using a combined 1H NMR and LC-IM-MS metabolomics approach.  In Project 2, I will uncover whether the element boron’s role in secondary metabolites, particularly of marine algae, is to provide conformational stabilization.  With Project 3, I will investigate the ecological roles of an oil spill-associated bacterium and oil spills on the beach sand microbial communities of the Gulf of Mexico.  Lastly, in Project 4, I will determine how nutrient regimes affect the chemical-signal detection, production, and uptake in a phytoplankton-bacteria interaction.