S19: Translating bacterial metabolic exchange with imaging mass spectrometry

Adaptive metabolic exchange is found in all kingdoms of life, yet there are only a few tools available to monitor such metabolic exchange. In our laboratory, imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) approaches are adapted to visualize both inter and intra-species exchange of secondary metabolites between small populations of bacterial cells in a spatial fashion. The interest in the development of IMS approaches to capture microbial metabolic exchange is based on the hypothesis that microbial responses have co-evolved to interact through a network of metabolic output signals and that by understanding the nature of this system wide metabolic chemical warfare we may discover the next generation therapeutic lead compounds or therapeutic paradigms. In this presentation our ongoing developments of IMS approaches to capture natural products involved in intra and inter-species communication in a spatio-temporal fashion are highlighted. These tools not only enable the discovery of new cannibalistic natural products from intensely studied organisms such as B. subtilis but also provide an antibiotic discovery platform against pathogens such as S. aureus. The identification and structural elucidation of novel natural products with biological activities as described in this lecture highlights the strength of imaging mass spectrometry in the investigations of natural product mediated metabolic exchange of microbial colonies.