Introduction to microbial metabolomics

Abstract

We could say that the concept of metabolomics started with microorganisms because the first published metabolome studies were focused on microbial systems and since the early 1990s, metabolite profiling has been applied to microbiology for phenotypic characterization of microbial strains and as a tool for microbial identification. This chapter presents a brief history of microbial metabolomics in the past 14 years, highlighting major breakthroughs and achievements as well as remaining technical challenges in the field. The future of microbial metabolomics will certainly depend on increasing sensitivity of analytical techniques to allow the detection and identification of intracellular metabolites using very small biomass samples. Mass spectrometry seems to be the technology with best potential to achieve this objective. Important recent steps have been taken towards this goal, meaning that single-cell microbial metabolomics could be very close to reality.