FUNBIT · Imaging Mass Spectrometry of Fungal – Bacterial Interplay

Imaging Mass Spectrometry of Fungal – Bacterial Interplay

"Microorganisms interact with each other by releasing small chemical compounds, referred here as ""natural products"", that we can exploit to treat diseases and fight agricultural pests. The research on natural products have a huge impact for society, as highlighted by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 program: on one hand, the challenge of antibiotics resistance is at the top of the list of priorities for the Scientific Panel for Health; on the other hand, the safe and sustainable treatment of agricultural pests is crucial to ensure Food Security and Sustainable use of the European natural resources. The search for new secondary metabolites is a never-ending quest. Traditional methods based on bioassay-guided fractionation still play an important role, but they are very demanding in time and resources, and usually lead to the re-discovery of known compounds. Nowadays, genome mining (the use of information in the genome to understand the metabolism), has revealed that many microorganisms have a huge hidden biosynthetic potential: the number of genes with the ability to encode the production of natural products surpasses by far the number of discovered compounds. Known natural products are only the tip of the iceberg. One of the reason explaining why most natural products remain undiscovered is that the genetic machinery responsible for their production in microorganisms, specially in fungi, usually remain silent under standard in-lab microbial cultivation protocols. Mimicking the complex microbial communities in the laboratory can stimulate the microbes to reveal the chemicals involved in their communication and competition. Since co-cultures of fungi and bacteria can provide a promising source of unexplored natural products, it is surprising how they have been overlooked in the scientific literature. The reason may be that several challenges hinder the discovery of natural products from co-cultures: 1) secondary metabolites may be produced in very low quantities in a very localized area; 2) they can be very difficult to extract from the solid medium where the fungi and bacteria are grown; and 3) once a potentially new secondary metabolite is found, if it is outside of its native environment, its biological meaning may be difficult to trace. In brief, detecting secondary metabolites involved in interactions between organisms often requires the participants to be caught in the act. A great candidate to study microbial interactions is the emerging technique Imaging Mass Spectrometry (Imaging MS), that allows the in situ and real time monitoring of chemical compounds directly on biological samples such as petri dishes and tissues of animals, plants and fungi, enabling the monitoring of chemical compounds while the interacting organisms are in contact. Thus, FUNBIT aims to enhance the rate of secondary natural product discovery guided by Imaging MS. "

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз