I guess if it’s more about the GOE and how species respond maybe a new thread is good, you could use this one if you think it fits.
This is quite an interesting page on how different compounds impact microbes. Here’s some quotes:
Phenolics tend to be stable, persistent on surfaces, and less toxic than phenol. They inhibit microbial growth by denaturing proteins and disrupting membranes.
Heavy metals kill microbes by binding to proteins, thus inhibiting enzymatic activity. Heavy metals are oligodynamic, meaning that very small concentrations show significant antimicrobial activity.
Various forms of mercury bind to sulfur-containing amino acids within proteins, inhibiting their functions.
Iodine works by oxidizing cellular components, including sulfur-containing amino acids, nucleotides, and fatty acids, and destabilizing the macromolecules that contain these molecules.
{Alcohols} They work by rapidly denaturing proteins, which inhibits cell metabolism, and by disrupting membranes, which leads to cell lysis. Once denatured, the proteins may potentially refold if enough water is present in the solution.
Chlorhexidine disrupts cell membranes and is bacteriostatic at lower concentrations or bactericidal at higher concentrations, in which it actually causes the cells’ cytoplasmic contents to congeal.
There’s more. I guess the main things are disruption of processes inside the cell, potentially disruption of the membrane. We could have things like some compounds which bind to others making them useless, like if you are an anaerobe then if there is oxygen around it starts to burn up your glucose giving you nothing in return. Also we could disrupt the active elements of a cell, like clogging flagella so they don’t work so well, though that might just be annoying.