Georg Pohnert

In this lecture I will introduce the complex communities of plankton organisms that live in the open ocean and the concept that interactions between species in this seemingly homogeneous environment are often mediated by chemical signals. I will describe the analytical approaches to isolate and identify infochemicals from the dilute matrix of the open ocean. I will especially focus on metabolomic techniques and how results from such high throughput methods can be transferred to questions of ecological interactions. The talk will feature aspects of analytical chemistry, organic synthesis and biological testing of marine natural products.