What species live in this coral reef, and are they healthy? Chemical clues emitted by marine organisms might hold that information.
What species live in this coral reef, and are they healthy? Chemical clues emitted by marine organisms might hold that information. But in underwater environments, invisible compounds create a complex “soup” that is hard for scientists to decipher. Now, researchers in ACS’ Journal of Proteome Research have demonstrated a way to extract and identify these indicator compounds in seawater. They found metabolites previously undetected on reefs, including three that may represent different reef organisms.
Plants and animals living in coral reefs release various substances, from complex macromolecules to individual amino acids, into the surrounding water. To determine which ones could identify the ecosystems’ inhabitants and be used to measure a coral reef’s health, scientists need to prepare water samples for analysis by concentrating the compounds and separating them from the salty broth. They primarily concentrate and collect these dissolved compounds from seawater on sticky membranes. However, this method misses many important nitrogen-, oxygen- and sulfur-containing compounds produced by marine organisms. These metabolites don’t attach well to the membrane materials and are present at extremely low levels in seawater. To overcome these challenges, Brianna Garcia, Amy Apprill, Elizabeth Kujawinski and colleagues at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution tested a technique that modified the dissolved metabolites before they were extracted from seawater into a form that’s compatible with membrane materials allowing them to be concentrated and analyzed.
Read more at American Chemical Society
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