The Chemistry of Algal Secondary Metabolism

Natural product chemistry is a branch of organic chemistry that touches upon many other fields of science, especially applied sciences such as medicine, agriculture, and engineering. It is fundamentally a basic science, involved in the discovery, characterization and cataloging of new chemical substances found in nature. Among other basic scientists, biologists and ecologists recognized some time ago that natural products might help explain species composition, distribution, and diversity in some settings, establishing the field of chemical ecology (Harborne 1989). The field has developed largely around collaborations of chemists and biologists, each bringing their own knowledge base to chemical ecological questions. This chapter is intended as an overview of natural product chemistry with an emphasis on the chemical aspects of algal defensive metabolites. It is our hope that algal ecologists will gain insight into the chemistry in the same manner that chemists will acquire a deeper understanding of the ecology from the remaining chapters of this book.