Pieter Dorrestein

Digitizing the Chemistry of Microbes

It is becoming clear that the microbes play critical roles in human/plant or ocean health but to understand the roles microbes play and their relationship to the chemistries is, in general, still poorly understood. The Collaborative Mass Spectrometry Innovation Center that I direct plays a key role in the development of approaches to begin unraveling the chemistry of microbial systems. In this presentation we will highlight the latest developments of mass spectrometry based tools, including our crowd source molecular annotation platform, large scale mass spectrometry based genome mining efforts and 3D cartography to study the distributions of therapeutics, metabolites of microbial interactions and microbiome and demonstrate how this may be achieved on clinically relevant time scales.