Digitizing mass spectrometry data to explore the chemical diversity and distribution of marine cyanobacteria and algae
- University of California, San Diego, United States
- European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Germany
Abstract
Natural product screening programs have uncovered molecules from diverse natural sources with various biological activities and unique structures. However, much is yet underexplored and additional information is hidden in these exceptional collections. We applied untargeted mass spectrometry approaches to capture the chemical space and dispersal patterns of metabolites from an in-house library of marine cyanobacterial and algal collections. Remarkably, 86% of the metabolomics signals detected were not found in other available datasets of similar nature, supporting the hypothesis that marine cyanobacteria and algae possess distinctive metabolomes. The data were plotted onto a world map representing 8 major sampling sites, and revealed potential geographic locations with high chemical diversity. We demonstrate the use of these inventories as a tool to explore the diversity and distribution of natural products. Finally, we utilized this tool to guide the isolation of a new cyclic lipopeptide, yuvalamide A, from a marine cyanobacterium.
Article and author information
Author details
Tal Luzzatto Knaan
Funding
National Institutes of Health (GM107550)
- William H Gerwick
European Union FP7
- Theodore Alexandrov
H2020 (305259 and 634402)
- Theodore Alexandrov
Vaadia-BARD Fellowship no.FI-494-13
- Tal Luzzatto Knaan
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Emmanuel Gaquerel, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Version history
- Received: December 13, 2016
- Accepted: April 29, 2017
- Accepted Manuscript published: May 11, 2017 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: May 23, 2017 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2017, Luzzatto Knaan et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Digitizing mass spectrometry data to explore the chemical diversity and distribution of marine cyanobacteria and algae
eLife 6:e24214.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.24214
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