Chemical Investigation of Floridian Mangrove Endophytes and Antarctic Marine Organisms

Nature creates diseases and illnesses for mankind, however, nature also provides therapeutics by making biological systems produce secondary metabolites. Although the secondary metabolites originally play roles in chemical defense or evolution, researchers have been working on them for drug discovery. Plants, fungi and marine organisms have been mostly explored by natural products chemists over the century and contributed most drugs to the market. With the increasing need of new drugs resulting from drug resistance and pathogen evolution, the natural products area has been focused on developing innovative methodologies to achieve higher efficiency of isolating new bioactive compounds. This dissertation herein presented studies focusing on isolating bioactive secondary metabolites from Floridian mangrove endophytes and marine invertebrates. An anti-tuberculosis fungus strain was cultivated in large scale with epigenetic modification. Several bioactive fungal metabolites were isolated and identified. From the Antarctica, a coral, Thouarella chilensis, and an undescribed red sponge were chemically investigated. Two new compounds were isolated from the Antarctica coral