Bacteria and Archaea along with Eukaryotes constitute the tree of life. How they interact with each other as well as their environment, particularly in extreme ones is a fascinating field. Humans (Eukaryotes) use language to communicate with each other. Bacteria and archaea communicate too, but they use the language of chemistry to do so.  Territorial disputes between bacterial species are common in most habitats, and is of great interest to decipher and decode the language that is used in these encounters. Mass spectrometry based approaches provides one means of studying these events and can be extended to study bacteria and archaea in extreme environments. This includes Nanospray Desorption Electrospray Ionization (nanoDESI) mass spectrometry, secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), coupled with fluorescence and electron microscopies. Here we study model microbial community structure and metabolism (Myxococcus xanthus and Bacillus subtilis) to investigate how and why a community responds to an external threat in a localized, regional or global manner, in other words how do they sense their environment? Both Archaea and Bacteria adapt to survive in their environment.  SM1 Euryarchaeon can live in nearly pure monospecies biofilms or in communities with bacteria, depending on their habitat.  As a second example, we will describe how SIMS was used to image lipid biomarkers of the SM1 Euryarchaeon biofilms, providing insight into phylogeny, biofilm structure and organization.

Mass spectrometry based approaches to probe bacterial and archaeal colonies and environments

248th National Meeting (2014)

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