Marine Natural Products: Chemical Ecology and Metabolomics
A special issue of Metabolites (ISSN 2218-1989). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Metabolomics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2021) | Viewed by 5222
Special Issue Editor
Interests: marine chemical ecology; structural characterization of natural products; chemical analysis/metabolomic approach
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear colleagues,
Marine natural products research has now become a multidisciplinary field of investigation, combining complementary technologies and methodologies to explore the relatively unknown field of marine chemodiversity. Over the last century, chemists have focused their efforts on the discovery of novel bioactive molecules from this promising source of chemical diversity and reported a great number of original structures exhibiting interesting pharmacological properties sometimes based on new modes of action.
In addition to these anthropocentric investigations, marine chemical ecology has, within the last twenty years, emerged as an important field of study to highlight and understand the role of bioactive compounds as mediators of organismal interactions in the marine environment. For many years, marine biologists have investigated ecological processes such as prey selection, dominance, mating, herbivory, and consumer–prey interactions because they have a strong impact on marine ecosystems. It is now clear that chemical cues play a major role in interactions by attracting or repelling predators, inhibiting the development of competitors, and by protecting hosts from infection or UV radiation. It has been also demonstrated that chemically mediated interactions could be deeply affected by environmental stress due to biotic or abiotic factors.
In order to understand the complexity of chemical interactions in the marine environment, a collaboration between ecologists and chemists enhanced by the multidisciplinary background of young scientists represents a great opportunity to design realistic ecological experiments and to elucidate the structure of the chemical mediators involved in this language of life. These collaborations and developments in metabolomics tools in recent years have led to the development of an emerging approach to characterize environmentally relevant signaling molecules. This concept, based on the rapid assessment of the global content of small molecules produced by a living organism, allows for the comparison of metabolic profiles, thus making the elucidation of key compound structures more efficient. This is primarily achieved by helping to overcome the problems encountered with conventional bioassay-guided strategies.
The goal of this Special Issue is to highlight the strategies of metabolomics approaches and their specificities in the field of marine chemical ecology as well as the discovery of key signal mediators in the marine environment.
Dr. Nathalie Tapissier
Guest Editor
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