IDBac: an open-access web platform to identify bacteria and analyze relationships in culture collections using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry

The identification and analysis of bacteria is central to the microbiological sciences. While gene sequencing methods have been the standard to achieve this, use of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry (MS), particularly in clinical microbiology, can provide high-throughput identification to the subspecies level. However, biotyping has yet to be adopted outside of clinical settings due to the lack of a centralized public database of MS protein signatures that would facilitate isolate identification via spectral comparison. Further, most current MALDI MS data analysis platforms lack meaningful ways to compare properties from large numbers of bacterial isolates. Herein we present the IDBac web platform, a crowd-sourced central knowledgebase of protein MS signatures spanning seven bacterial phyla. Accompanying the knowledgebase is analysis infrastructure to identify unknown isolates, probe relationships within culture collections using metadata integration, and visualize specialized metabolite differences within groups of closely related bacteria. To highlight this utility and encourage wide community contribution, examples of each are presented. The use of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry (MS) for high-throughput identification of bacteria is hampered by the lack of public central repositories of protein MS signatures. Here, the authors present an open-access database of MALDI-TOF MS protein signatures and a web platform that can be used to identify bacteria, visualize metadata, and assess differences in specialized metabolites. The authors wish to acknowledge the Integrated Molecular Structure Education and Research Center (IMSERC) at Northwestern University, where the MALDI-TOF MS data for database deposition were collected. The authors wish to acknowledge Oscar Spilberg f... [2782 chars]