Showing papers by "Curt R. Fischer published in 2012"

Deuterium-exchange metabolomics identifies N -methyl lyso phosphatidylethanolamines as abundant lipids in acidophilic mixed microbial communities

Abstract: Natural microbial communities are extremely diverse and contain uncharacterized but functionally important small molecules By coupling a deuterium (D) labeling technique to high mass accuracy untargeted liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-mass spec- trometry (LC-ESI-MS) metabolomic analysis, we found that natural acidophilic microbial biofilms dominated by bacteria of the genus Leptospirillum contained unusual lyso phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) lipids in high abundance (more than 10 nmol/mg of dry biomass) The unusual polar head group structure of these lipids is similar to lipids found in phylogenetically unrelated acidophilic chemo- autolithotrophs and may be related to the affinity of these lipids for iron and calcium ions Correlations of lyso phospholipid and proteome abundance patterns suggest a link between the lyso phospholipids and the UBA-type substrain of Leptospirillum group II By combining untar- geted metabolomics with D exchange we demonstrate the ability to identify cryptic but biologically functional small molecules in mixed microbial communities