About this Research Topic

Background

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) has revolutionized the characterization of microorganisms in clinical microbiology and has evolved into the main strategy to identify microorganisms in the lab. The MS based technologies, including MALDI-TOF MS, liquid or gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS, GC-MS/MS) or MALDI-imaging, have the potential to be successfully employed (i) to develop new approaches for the rapid characterization of microorganisms in clinical diagnostics, (ii) to investigate specific aspects such as the interactions in the infected host, in the environment and in, microbial processes in the industry, and (iii) to improve our general knowledge of microorganisms, including ongoing metabolic, biosynthetic and signaling pathways.

The goal of this Research Topic is to bundle discoveries that bridge the gap between MS and microbiology sciences. We believe that MS-based techniques can bring a lot of added value to the microbiology research. For instance, high resolution LC-MS/MS might be used to characterize rapidly microorganisms, Selected / Multiple reaction monitoring (SRM or MRM) might be used to better quantify and identify selected targeted proteins, to identify post translational modifications (PTMs) and their functions, or to analyze ongoing enzymatic processes in a microbiome. However, automatization, standardization, ruggedization in data analysis, sample preparation, peptide separation and acquisition parameters of MS towards microbiology related applications are needed, as it has been done for the MALDI-TOF MS technique in the past.

This Research Topic encourages original research articles, brief research reports, innovating methods, perspective, opinion articles and reviews in the field of microbial proteomics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Identification of bacteria and viruses using mass spectrometry techniques
• MS analysis exploring microbial phenotypes
• Monitoring microbial enzyme activity with MS
• Protein functions elucidation with the help of MS
• Applications of MS based quantitative proteomics in microbes
• Developing analytic approaches for microbiology proteomic data
• Improving the annotation of microbiological proteomes.
• Understanding effective drug targeting on pathogens (e.g. antibiotics, antivirals)
• MS based metabolomic approaches to characterize microbes.
• Resistance and virulence in bacteria detected by MS

Keywords: mass spectrometry, liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, infection, bacteria, virus, phenotype, microbiome, microbiota, metabolome, proteome, host-pathogen interactions, antimicrobial resistance, quantitative proteomics, bio-informatics, proteomics, virulence

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