Microbial metabolomics: past, present and future methodologies.
Microbial metabolomics has received much attention in recent years mainly because it supports and complements a wide range of microbial research areas from new drug discovery efforts to metabolic engineering. Broadly, the term metabolomics refers to the comprehensive (qualitative and quantitative) analysis of the complete set of all low molecular weight metabolites present in and around growing cells at a given time during their growth or production cycle. This review focuses on the past, current and future development of various experimental protocols in the rapid developing area of metabolomics in the ongoing quest to reliably quantify microbial metabolites formed under defined physiological conditions. These developments range from rapid sample collection, instant quenching of microbial metabolic activity, extraction of the relevant intracellular metabolites as well as quantification of these metabolites using enzyme based and or modern high tech hyphenated analytical protocols, mainly chromatographic techniques coupled to mass spectrometry (LC-MS(n), GC-MS(n), CE-MS(n)), where n indicates the number of tandem mass spectrometry, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR).
Mashego
Mlawule R
MR
Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Technical University of Delft, Delft, The Netherlands. M.Mashego@tnw.tudelft.nl
Rumbold
Karl
K
De Mey
Marjan
M
Vandamme
Erick
E
Soetaert
Wim
W
Heijnen
Joseph J
JJ
D001419:Bacteria / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D001426:Bacterial Proteins / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D005544:Forecasting; D005656:Fungal Proteins / Q000378:metabolism*; D005658:Fungi / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling / Q000639:trends*; D008954:Models, Biological; D010449:Peptide Mapping / Q000639:trends; D020543:Proteome / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D040901:Proteomics / Q000639:trends
D001426:Bacterial Proteins; D005656:Fungal Proteins; D020543:Proteome