Welcome to the S-022 home page. We are a team of biologists and chemists based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and at the University of South Florida who study how organisms utilize chemical compounds to defend themselves from predators, competitors, and organisms that would overgrow or infect them.

S-022 means "science group 22" and is the original designation given to us by our sponsor, the Antarctic Organisms and Ecosystems program in the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation. Our official designation is now B-022-L/P, primarily to indicate that we are a biology group working from the research ship Laurence M. Gould and (primarily) from Palmer Station.

The project was initiated in 1988 by Dr. Jim McClintock, a marine ecologist and invertebrate zoologist from the Biology Department at UAB. Dr. Bill Baker, a natural products chemist from the Chemistry Department at USF, joined him in 1992. The most recent addition is Dr. Chuck Amsler, a marine algal ecophysiologist also from the UAB Biology Department, who joined the team in 1996.

Much of our recent work has focused on defenses against predators in a variety of sluggish or sessile marine invertebrates including sponges, echinoderms, and nudibranchs and on defenses against herbivores in macroalgae. This includes questions of tissue-specific sequestration, of chemical defenses in eggs, embryos, and larvae, and of the evolution of chemical defenses in general. We have also begun to probe the chemical interactions between invertebrates and their bacterial and algal microfloras.