Small talk: tapping the chemical conversations between tiny animals and their tinier symbionts

Marine animals have many different types of relationships with their symbiotic bacteria, from casual interactions to ancient associations. Chemistry provides the key ingredient in many of these relationships, leading to many potently active natural products that have been useful in drug discovery and development. These natural products are important to the animal-bacteria associations and are found in high concentrations within the animals.

For practical reasons, research so far has largely focused on larger animals, leaving the majority of small animals relatively untouched as a source of discovery. Here, we describe an approach that directly obtains and supplies the most abundant bioactive compounds, even from very small animals. This approach should be useful in obtaining potential therapeutics from the majority of animals that were previously inaccessible to chemistry.