IDBac

IDBac profiles bacterial protein and specialized metabolite mass spectra obtained by in situ MALDI-TOF MS to correlate bacterial identity with metabolic production.

Key Features:

• In situ MALDI-TOF MS: Analyzes protein and specialized metabolite spectra directly from single bacterial colonies on agar plates using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS).
• Dual profiling: Integrates analysis of both protein mass spectra and specialized metabolite spectra to link taxonomic signals with metabolic outputs.
• High-throughput analysis: Supports rapid processing of large numbers of colony spectra for comparative studies.
• Clustering and dendrogram generation: Produces hierarchical clustering and dendrograms based on protein mass spectrometry fingerprints for grouping isolates.
• Metabolite Association Networks (MANs): Constructs Metabolite Association Networks to associate specialized metabolite features with isolates.
• Data processing and visualization: Processes complex mass spectrometry data sets and generates visual representations of relationships among isolates and metabolites.

Scientific Applications:

• Strain differentiation: Distinguished two Bacillus subtilis strains within 30 minutes by differential production of cyclic peptide antibiotics linked to a single frameshift mutation.
• Intraspecies metabolite profiling: Detected differences in metal-scavenging acyl-desferrioxamines among Micromonospora isolates with over 99% 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity.
• Environmental microbiology: Generated hierarchical protein MS groupings of environmental isolates from Lake Michigan sponges within three hours that reflected phylogenetic relationships and separated isolates with nearly identical 16S rRNA sequences based on metabolite production.

Methodology:

IDBac integrates in situ MALDI-TOF MS analyses of protein content and specialized metabolite production, performs clustering into dendrograms from protein MS fingerprints, constructs Metabolite Association Networks (MANs), and processes and visualizes mass spectrometry data sets.