Other uses of MALDI-TOF

I have to say, I knew after being introduced to MALDI-TOF in biochemistry a few weeks ago that it was an amazing piece of equipment, but I feel like I just keeping learning more and more amazing things about them!! In Environmental Microbiology (which, by the way, I recommend to everyone!), we just read a paper titled “Microbial metabolic exchange in 3D” by Watrous et al. that used MALDI-TOF imaging mass spectroscopy, which is apparently used for tissue samples, in a really brilliant way. They measured production of chemicals by microbes in agar plates by sectioning the agar and analyzing the inner area, rather than simply whatever grows on the surface. Better yet, they could use this technique to see how metabolic chemicals released by one microbe, such as Bacillus subtilis, influences the production of chemicals and metabolites by other microbes, for instance Streptomyces coelicolor. They were even able to measure the output by individual hyphae of Candida albicans in the presence of Pseudonmonas aeroginosa, which requires high levels of precision, as I’m sure you can imagine. I just thought it was really interesting to see all the uses of something that I first saw in biochem lab!

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