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… of Oceanography in San Diego. Bill is a pioneer of marine natural products, getting into the ocean and looking … into the secondary metabolism of some more novel marine bacteria. You know, I first met Bill as a postdoc working … in chemistry with a hobby of putting your head underwater. But thankfully that worked out. And I spent 30, 40 …

And a lot of us moved on to work in simpler systems, like bacteria, where we figure we can make more progress faster, … amino acids it has access to, which can be really weird and different, and makes for lots of variety in chemistry. The … grade list of goals in life: on that list are being a marine biologist and being a chemist, and it’s actually …

… chemical compounds that you find in plants, fungi and bacteria, basically all living things. When your crazy Aunt … and it gets up into the air and you can smell it. That fresh dirt smell: that is bacteria making natural products  … tell.  ALISON: It could be bacterial blankets, or coats, or water bottles, in a metaphor…. DAN: Or because they’re …

… that we’ve had on this podcast, the idea of taking all the different natural products data that there is and putting … wouldn’t it be cool to look at these– it was actually marine invertebrates there– but look at these things in the … biology classes in undergrad, but my PhD was an actinobacteria. And I tell all my students this now, but when I …

… quality. Yeah, for sure. NADINE ZIEMERT: Yeah, Dan… it’s a marine actinomycete bacterium. So they look kind of like … They have this typical mycelium. But they only grow in saltwater. So we’re thinking they’re obligate marine. There’s so far no species or no strains known that really grow in freshwater. But they’re actually pretty orange, and they …

… working with him.  We talk about his father, the legendary marine natural products chemist, Richard Moore, and get into … Initially, my group really focused on marine actinobacteria. Then we moved into marine proteobacteria. Not a … to be able to use their technology of autonomous underwater rovers that look like a torpedo, pretty much. And they …

… are you?  MARCY: Am fine. I live in a pandemic so I’m no different than anyone else.  DAN: Yeah. I mean fine in … about something I can kind of see like the squid and the bacteria and how the chemistry is going back and forth … and so we were able to actually not dive to collect the marine tunicates, which was nice because it’s also cold. And …

… has to have a story. And it can be looking for drugs from marine organisms, in which case you get to go to exotic … in the marine ecosystems and marine actinomycetes and cyanobacteria. And we thought we could also– let’s see what caves … Do you go after sediment? Do you go after– if there’s any water– or I guess, when you’re down there, is it something …

… on synthetic biology of engineering gene expression in bacteria – however, the professor was actually quite … then got funded to work for two years at the Max Planck for marine microbiology in Bremen, Germany. And I wanted to work … across species that might be a little bit more genetically distant where the BGCs may have drifted but they might still …

… through the stories I told you about geosmin, which is a bacterial sacred metabolite, and ergot alkaloids come from … cell.  DAN: It depends on lifestyle. So there are lots of different organisms that produce secondary metabolites for … weaken a cell wall, then the bacteria will just pop like a water balloon. But, you know, if you make modifications to …

NIGEL MOUNCEY: Right. An amazing product, really, in a way. Different formulations. But the breadth of crops, the … [LAUGHTER] We were just trying to keep our head above water and find cool things. So it was a very research … An Age of CRAGE: Advances in Rapidly Engineering Non-model Bacteria Check out the agenda for the JGI’s 2021 Annual …

… work like ActDES, which is a curated database of actinobacteria for evolutionary studies, and hopefully we can … as a field, or subdisciplines, started to grow and have different perspectives– from the chemists on one side, … BARONA-GOMEZ: Yeah, so any metabolite, produced by bacterial or fungal metabolism by microbes, will have a …