Traditionally, microbes are studied under controlled laboratory conditions as isolates in planktonic culture. However, this is a vast extrapolation from their natural state; development of new techniques is required to decipher the largely unknown world of microbial chemical interactions in more realistic environments. The field of mass spectrometry imaging has made significant progress in loca...

In polymicrobial infections, microbes can interact with both the host immune system and one another through direct contact or the secretion of metabolites, affecting disease progression and treatment options. The thick mucus in the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis is highly susceptible to polymicrobial infections by opportunistic pathogens, including the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa a...

Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight (MALDI-TOF) imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) applied directly to microbes on agar-based medium captures global information about microbial molecules, allowing for direct correlation of chemotypes to phenotypes. This tool was developed to investigate metabolic exchange factors of intraspecies, interspecies, and polymicrobial interactions....

MALDI-TOF-MS of microorganisms, which identifies microbes based on masses of high abundant low molecular weight proteins, is rapidly advancing to become another standard method in clinical routine laboratory diagnostics. Allelic isoforms of these proteins result in varying masses of detectable biomarker ions. These variations give rise to a novel typing method for microorganisms named mass spec...

It is now more than 10 years since the publication of the first microbial genome sequence and science is now moving towards a post genomic era with transcriptomics and proteomics offering insights into cellular processes and function. The ability to assess the entire protein network of a cell at a given spatial or temporal point will have a profound effect upon microbial science as the function...

The full implications of a stat ist ical model for growth of a microbial cell populat ion using cell mass as the index of physiological s ta te have been examined by solving the part ia l differential integral equations resulting from the model. Calculations reveal t ha t a lag phase is predicted during the initial stages of ba tch growth al though no specific cellular mechanism for the phenome...

Recently, we demonstrated that a matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (MALDI-TOF MS) can be used to determine the molecular weight of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products of intact 16S rRNA regions and to profile their restriction digests. This is the first time that MALDI-TOF MS with ultraviolet (UV) photoionization has been used to analyze a PCR pro...

The composition of human skin acts as a natural habitat for various bacterial species that function in a commensal and symbiotic fashion. In a healthy individual, bacterial flora serves to protect the host. Under certain conditions such as minor trauma, impaired host immunity, or environmental factors, the risk of developing skin infections is increased. Although a large majority of bacterial a...

Integrating the governing chemistry with the genomics and phenotypes of microbial colonies has been a "holy grail" in microbiology. This work describes a highly sensitive, broadly applicable, and cost-effective approach that allows metabolic profiling of live microbial colonies directly from a Petri dish without any sample preparation. Nanospray desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrome...