Abstract

Metabolites are small organic molecules produced during cellular metabolism, and while there are several thousands of them, we are only starting to learn about their importance in the marine environment. I will present how some of them, like the B vitamins, influence the ocean's carbon cycle and phytoplankton and bacterial diversity. I will also show how an untargeted analysis of metabolites in seawater could be used to discover the presence of hundreds of organic compounds, providing previously unknown metabolic information. I will present some of the metabolomics (targeted and untargeted) results obtained at the new Marine Biomolecules laboratory at the IMEDEA in samples collected during two Spanish cruises in the Atlantic Ocean.