12 research outputs found
Partially relativistic self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensates with a stiff equation of state
Antarctic marine chemical ecology: what is next?
71 páginas, 1 tabla, 3 figuras.Antarctic ecosystems are exposed to unique environmental characteristics
resulting in communities structured both by biotic interactions such as
predation and competition, as well as abiotic factors such as seasonality and
ice-scouring. It is important to understand how ecological factors may trigger
chemical mechanisms in marine Antarctic organisms as a response for survival.
However, very little is known yet about the evolution of chemical compounds
in Antarctic organisms. Investigations in chemical ecology have demonstrated
over the last several years that defensive metabolites have evolved in numerous
representative Antarctic species. This contradicts earlier theories concerning
biogeographic variation in predation and chemical defenses. As reviewed here,
a number of interesting natural products have been isolated from Antarctic
organisms. However, we believe many more are still to be discovered. Currently, many groups such as microorganisms, planktonic organisms and deepsea fauna remain almost totally unknown regarding their natural products.
Furthermore, for many described compounds, ecological roles have yet to be
evaluated. In fact, much of the research carried out to date has been conducted
in the laboratory, and only in a few cases in an ecologically relevant context.
Therefore, there is a need to extend the experiments to the field, as done in
tropical and temperate marine ecosystems, or at least, to test the activity of the
chemicals in natural conditions and ecologically meaningful interactions.
Defense against predators is always one of the main topics when talking about
the roles of natural products in species interactions, but many other interesting
aspects, such as competition, chemoattraction, fouling avoidance and ultraviolet (UV) protection, also deserve further attention. In our opinion, challenging
future developments are to be expected for Antarctic marine chemical ecology
in the years to come.This work would not have been possible without the financial support of the Ministry of
Science and Education of Spain through different
grants along recent years in the general frame of
our ECOQUIM projects (ANT97-1590-E, ANT97-0273,
REN2002-12006-E ⁄ANT, REN2003-00545 and CGL2004-
03356 ⁄ANT).Peer reviewe