Chapter 6 - Application of proteomics and metabolomics in microbiology research

Abstract

Recently, proteomics and metabolomics have become popular omics technologies that can provide abundant biological and metabolic information on microbiology research. In proteomic studies, top-down and bottom-up approaches are used to investigate the proteome by using either liquid-chromatography mass spectrometry or matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry. Top-down proteomic approaches enable the identification and quantification of intact proteins, while bottom-up proteomic approaches analyze proteolyzed proteins followed by multiple peptide identifications. In metabolomic studies, untargeted and targeted approaches can analyze the metabolome by using nuclear magnetic resonance/gas-chromatography mass spectrometry/liquid-chromatography mass spectrometry. Untargeted metabolomic approach profiles all the metabolites in a single sample; on the contrary, targeted metabolomic approach only analyzes the targeted analytes. In this chapter, we have discussed the use of proteomics in different aspects of microbiology research, including the identification of pathogenic bacteria, host-pathogen interactions, characterization of biological membrane, antibiotics resistance, antibiotics resistance, advance growth rate of bacteria, and energy conversion; untargeted and targeted metabolomics are applied to improve the production of various bioproduction targets, the exploration of the effect of unknown genes, and the development of synthetic methylotrophic strains.