Benchmarking and developing mass-spectrometry based omics approaches for complex microbiomes

The large unexplored space of microbial biodiversity forms a well of untapped potential of enzymes and bioactive compounds. Genomic methods have made significant improvements over the past decades in their analysis of microbial communities. However, several aspects of nature can’t be described by a genome alone, such as expressed functions in the proteome and complex products such as bacterial glycosylation. Mass spectrometry can provide both general and targeted methods for the analysis of phenotypes, but is facing challenges in its limited throughput and the demanding data analysis of complex samples, which necessitates new methodologies. This thesis therefore aims to compare, improve and develop now methods for the analysis of microbial communities using mass spectrometry...