AVS 58th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition
    Biomaterial Interfaces Division Wednesday Sessions
       Session BI-WeM

Invited Paper BI-WeM4
Developing Tools to Observe Microbial Metabolic Exchange in 2D and 3D

Wednesday, November 2, 2011, 9:00 am, Room 108

Session: Cells at Interfaces
Presenter: Pieter Dorrestein, University of California, San Diego
Authors: J. Watrous, University of California, San Diego
T. Alexandrov, University of Bremen, Germany
W.-T. Liu, University of California, San Diego
A. Lamsa, University of California, San Diego
D. Gonzalez, University of California, San Diego
N. Bandeira, University of California, San Diego
M. Hamby, University of California, San Diego
R. Kersten, University of California, San Diego
K. Pogliano, University of California, San Diego
B. Moore, University of California, San Diego
P.C. Dorrestein, University of California, San Diego
Correspondent: Click to Email
From the early days of bacterial culturing over a century ago, microbiologists have known that microorganisms respond to their surroundings. Unicellular organisms rely on natural product mediated metabolic exchange to adapt to environmental stresses, sense colony density, and form biofilms. However, studies of the chemistry and phenotypes that correspond to signaling behavior have largely been disconnected and measured indirectly. To connect the chemistry and phenotypes, imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) methodologies are developed to observe metabolic exchange mediated within pair-wise interactions and microbial communities in two- and three dimensions. IMS provides the ability to correlate the presence of metabolites to phenotypic changes and to detect new biological phenotypes. Many of such phenotypes cannot be observed by the naked eye.