Author:

Keywords:

Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, imaging mass spectrometry, microbial natural products, spatial metabolomics, 0301 Analytical Chemistry, 0601 Biochemistry and Cell Biology, 1103 Clinical Sciences, 3101 Biochemistry and cell biology, 3205 Medical biochemistry and metabolomics, 3401 Analytical chemistry

Abstract:

Metabolite annotation from imaging mass spectrometry (imaging MS) data is a difficult undertaking that is extremely resource intensive. Here, we adapted METASPACE, cloud software for imaging MS metabolite annotation and data interpretation, to quickly annotate microbial specialized metabolites from high-resolution and high-mass accuracy imaging MS data. Compared with manual ion image and MS1 annotation, METASPACE is faster and, with the appropriate database, more accurate. We applied it to data from microbial colonies grown on agar containing 10 diverse bacterial species and showed that METASPACE was able to annotate 53 ions corresponding to 32 different microbial metabolites. This demonstrates METASPACE to be a useful tool to annotate the chemistry and metabolic exchange factors found in microbial interactions, thereby elucidating the functions of these molecules.