Shimadzu Review Vol.80[3・4](2023)
Diagnostics

SPECIALLY COLLECTED PAPERS

Identification of Microorganisms by MALDI-MS
-Development of a Next-Generation MALDI-MS Microbial Identification Platform that Combines Genomics and Mass Spectrometry-

by Kanae Teramoto, Ph.D.1Yuji Sekiguchi, Ph.D.2

Shimadzu Review 80[3・4] (2023)

Abstract

MALDI-MS is in widespread use for microbial identification in clinical microbial testing. This method involves obtaining a mass spectrum from sample microbial cells and comparing it against a library of mass spectra from reference microbial strains. Because these libraries are often biased towards pathogenic species, this method is unable to identify many naturally occurring species, whether beneficial or harmful, not included in the library. By using a genomics-based approach, we have devised a new method that enables the broad-spectrum identification of bacterial and archaeal isolates with MALDI-MS. This method involved creating a large-scale database of protein masses predict-ed in silico from 200,000 publicly available bacterial and archaeal genomes and developing analysis algorithms that utilize this database. The database contains all theoretical protein masses potentially encoded in each genome, making this method robust to changes in mass spectra arising from differences in sample preparation and culture conditions. The next-generation MALDI-MS microbial identification platform we developed can also use this database to annotate spectral peaks with genome-related information such as inferred protein names and amino acid sequences, a feature that can be used for biomarker discovery and other more advanced analyses. This MALDI-MS microbial identification platform and in silico database promise to improve microbial testing and microbial studies in all fields of microbiology.


1MS Business Unit, Life Science Business Department, Analytical & Measuring Instruments Division, Shimadzu Corporation, Kyoto, Japan
2Biomedical Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

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