Recent advances in liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) based metabolomics have furthered understanding of metabolism in a variety of systems. Not only can such techniques be used to discover biomarkers for the physiological state of the system, they can also be used to probe the global metabolism of a sample by providing information on the concentration of thousands of molecules (i.e. the metabolome) from a single sample. Despite the power of this technique, biological and technical challenges hinder the use of metabolomics to interrogate microbial communities sampled from their natural habitat as wells as relate these results to studies performed in the lab. Herein, our efforts to circumvent these challenges and apply this emerging systems biology technique to natural microbial communities will be discussed. Using an untargeted metabolomics method employed on an UPLC-Orbitrap Exactive Plus MS, 90-180 known metabolites and <i>ca</i> 1500-5000 spectral features arising from water-soluble molecules with unknown structures have been detected from a consortia of dechlorinating microorganisms, SDC-9. The goal of this work was to monitor the global metabolism of the cultures and to determine whether metabolites involved in the chlorinated toxin degradation process can be used as biomarkers for monitoring remediation efforts. Laboratory experiments to measure the temporal changes in the metabolism of SDC-9 fed with both <i>cis</i>-dichloroethene and vinyl chloride have been performed, and partial least square discriminate analysis (PLS-DA) of the metabolomes could correctly predict the extent of dechlorination for each sample. This analysis also provided information on a number of potential biomarkers for dechlorination, and work is underway to determine whether these compounds can be used to monitor remediation efforts using data collected from sampling of a contaminated field site. The addition of UPLC-HRMS metabolomics or targeted analyses to the toolbox will provide new ways to monitor remediation efforts.

Metabolomics for environmental monitoring: Developing tools for monitoring the remediation activity of microbial consortia, SDC-9

2019 Spring National Meeting

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