In December 2018, about 80 scientist from 14 countries participated in the 3rd International Metaproteome Symposium. The leading event in the field of metaproteomics was organized by Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ and the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure - de.NBI*.
The number of publications examining microbiomes is currently exploding and results are providing new perspectives on human health and global nutrient cycles as well as on technical application of microbial communities in biotechnology. Multi-omics analysis is accepted as the gold standard to assess the microbiome samples but the data integration is still challenging. The symposium offered a great opportunity to broaden the discussion on the integration of different datasets. Besides results from all areas of microbial ecology, first results of collaborative multi-omics study of a human gut microbiome sample and of a defined microbial community were presented. First insights demonstrated the reliability of metaproteomics regarding the assignment of major phyla and functions. The ongoing analysis of data from multiple labs will provide more detailed knowledge on reliability of metaproteomic data obtained with different experimental and bioinformatic pipelines and will reveal aspects for further improvement of the different workflows.
The symposium provided a good platform for oral and poster presentations of young passionate scientists in the interdisciplinary field of microbiome research. Three posters representing well the range of scientific contributions were priced.
• Data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry enables reproducible characterization of microbiota function (Sami Pietilä, University of Turku)
• Exploring new small proteins in a simplified human gut microbiome (Hannes Petruschke, Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ)
• Prediction-based reduction of the search space leads to increased identifications in metaproteomics without impacting sensitivity (Tim van den Bossche, VIB - Ghent Center for Medical Biotechnology)
The scientific committee of the symposium agreed to continue this symposium series at interval of one and a half year.
Microbiome researchers interested in the emerging field metaproteomics are invited to join the Applied Metaproteomics Workshop (Magdeburg, June 2019) providing hands-on training for the complete workflow starting from design of experiments via sample preparation to measurement and bioinformatics (MetaProteomeAnalyzer Software) analysis of high-resolution MS data.