Proteomic approaches to bacterial differentiation.

Mass spectrometry-based proteomics has been used extensively to explore the proteomes of various organisms, and this technology is now being applied to the characterization of bacterial species. Predominantly, two methods emerge as leaders in this application. Intact protein profiling creates fingerprints of bacterial species which can be used for differentiation and tracking over time. Peptide-centric approaches, analyzed after enzymatic digestion, enable high-throughput proteome characterization in addition to species determination from the identification of peptides distinctive to a species. Highlighted herein is an application of a peptide-centric approach to the identification and quantitation of species-specific peptide identifiers using an in silico exploration and an experimental mass spectrometry-based method. The application to microbial communities is addressed with an in silico analysis of an artificial complex community of 25 microorganisms.