"It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision."
-Hellen Keller
-Hellen Keller
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.1,2,3 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 adaptive metabolism involved in intra and inter-species communication in a spatio-temporal fashion are highlighted. These tools not only enable the discovery of new cannibalistic adaptive metabolites from intensely studied organisms such as B. subtilis4 but also provide an antibiotic discovery platform against pathogens such as S. aureus and P. auerigunosa. The identification and structural elucidation of novel natural products with potent biological activities as described in this lecture highlights the strength of imaging mass spectrometry in the investigations of of adaptive metabolism from microbial colonies grown on top of a MALDI plate.
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