The chemical composition of the ocean’s community metabolome represents a fascinating source of chemical entities that are fundamentally important for ecosystem function and planetary processes such as global carbon cycling. Thanks to recent advances in tandem mass spectrometry and computational data analysis tools, we can identify a wide range of metabolites out of this ultra-complex mixture and propose some of their activities through literature knowledge. However, the number of known metabolites and activities represents only a small fraction of all compounds we can detect in these environments. To fully map out the structural and bioactivity space, new methods are needed, as traditional isolation and bioactivity studies do not scale to contemporary non-targeted metabolomics workflows. To address this need, we develop functional metabolomics tools that integrate multi-dimensional liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry with bioactivity profiling as well as native mass spectrometry. In combination with molecular networking, these workflows allow us to screen complex environmental samples for bioactivity, metal and protein binding and metabolic transformations. Taken together, our results provide new insights in the enormous chemical complexity of DOM and highlight the potential of functional metabolomics workflows for the linking of environmental metabolomics data and bioactivity, which we hope will contribute to a systematic mapping of the functional role and fate of small molecules in complex environmental systems.

Tutorial/Invited: Invited

Primary Presenter: Daniel Petras, University of Tuebingen (functionalmetabolomics@gmail.com)

Authors:

Abzer Pakkir Shah, University of Tuebingen  ()

Stilianos Lambidis, University of Tuebingen  ()

Karoline Steur-Lodd, University of Tuebingen  ()

Tilman Schramm, University of Tuebingen  ()

Ralph Torres, Scripps Institution of Oceanography  ()

Sara Rivera, Scripps Institution of Oceanography  ()

Lihini Aluwihare, Scripps Institution of Oceanography  ()

Brandon Stephens, University of California Santa Barbara  ()

Carsten Simon, Umweltforschungszentrum Leipzig  ()