Competitive, Inhibitory and Mutually Existing Interaction Mapping of Secondary Metabolites in Filamentous Fungi

Abstract

Natural products are compounds that are produced by living organisms, such as bacteria and fungi. These compounds are essential for advancements in the medical field, such as the discovery of new antibiotics. When living organisms like bacteria and fungi interact with one another, they can be forced to compete for resources to survive (antagonistic) or cooperate (synergistic). It is through these relationships that new metabolites can be produced and subsequently observed. The current research on co-culturing between bacterial and fungal species is limited, thus there are many possible undiscovered metabolites. Therefore, co-culturing of this nature can be analyzed using mass spectrometry for new natural product discovery. While typical methods for microorganism culturing can be applied to co-culturing, alternatively forcing species to interact in an artificially constructed growth chamber can offer interesting insights and changes to the metabolite profile. Herein, a 3D-printed artificial chamber was created to observe the growth and interaction of each species in diverse locations, thus allowing a spatiotemporal map of natural product growth to be generated through spectral analysis. In this work, spectral analysis is conducted using the Liquid Micro-Junction Surface Sampling Probe (LMJ-SSP), which allows for non-destructive sampling of the microorganism interactions. As a result, sampling can be conducted repeatedly at different times in growth development, as well as at diverse locations throughout the chamber. Ultimately, the further exploitation of both the competitive and synergistic relationship of microorganism growth within this chamber will offer novel insights into natural product discovery.