News

8^th September 2023

I would like to bring your attention to a seminar titled "New Approaches to Biomolecular Structure Determination Combining Crosslinking, UV-Vis Photodissociation Action Spectroscopy, and Cyclic Ion Mobility Mass Spectrometry." The seminar will be held on Monday, September 18th, at 11 a.m. in Building U on campus. Our speaker, Professor Frantisek Turecek, is from the University of Washington:

https://chem.washington.edu/people/frantisek-turecek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franti%C5%A1ek_Ture%C4%8Dek
https://gcms.cz/article/2560
https://doi.org/10.1002/mas.21859

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1^st September 2023

I am pleased to announce that Rutuja H. Patil has recently earned a Ph. D. in analytical chemistry. She successfully defended her thesis titled "Metabolomics of clinically significant strains of A. fumigatus and R. microsporus for the diagnosis of invasive fungal diseases". In less than four years of study, Rutu published five original papers. One paper was the first-authored and Rutu received shared first place in two others. All five articles were in the top 25% (microbiology, mycology), and one paper was in the top 10% (spectroscopy). She completed a three-month internship in transcriptomics at Imperial College London. She was the principal investigator for a grant project at Palacký University in Olomouc and is currently involved in two active grants (CSF and GA for medical research). The fourth project (GSF), in which she made significant contributions, was completed two years ago. Rutu was awarded mobility support for some of the fifteen scientific presentations. She actively operates four mass spectrometers, including an ion cyclotron resonance instrument, and assists in service measurements for other scientific groups. I am proud to announce that Rutu will continue her work in our lab as a postdoc, continuing to pursue our metallomics infections approaches.

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26^th May 2023

On 26 May 2023, an informal gathering of the laureates of the prestigious Otto Wichterle Premium (https://www.avcr.cz/cs/veda-a-vyzkum/podpora-vyzkumu/premie-otto-wichterleho/) took place at the Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Over the past 22 years, 23 young scientists from the Institute of Microbiology have been awarded the Otto Wichterle Premium. Together with the former director, Mrs. Blanka Říhová, and the current director, Mr. Jiří Hašek, the previous recipients reminisced about their younger years and congratulated this year's laureates, Dominika Luptáková and Jaroslav Semerád. During the meeting, Vladimir Havlicek mentioned that 43% of the laureates had become laboratory chairs. Interestingly, 39% of the recipients have been active mass spectrometry users. The complete list of recipients engaged with the Institute of Microbiology in Prague: Josef Komenda and Vladimír Havlíček (2002), Marek Šinkora (2003), Michal Koblížek and Petr Baldrián (2004), Petr Novak and Petr Halada (2005), Tomáš Cajthaml (2007), Radim Osička (2008), Petr Man and Michael Volný (2009), Marek Kovář (2010), Miroslav Kolařík (2013), Petra Procházková (2014), Pavel Hrouzek (2016), Zdeněk Kameník (2017), Tomáš Větrovský (2019), Petr Kohout and Anna Herrmannová (2020), Petra Beznosková (2021), Martin Ezechiáš (2022), Dominika Luptáková and Jaroslav Semerád (2023).

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24^th May 2023

Next-generation infection diagnostics. On Monday, during the Future Trends in Health Interventions conference in Krakow (https://cebc.pl/), we will compare the performance of the noninvasive infection metallomics armory with the standard serology, cultivation, microscopy, or nucleic acid analyses routinely used in invasive fungal infection diagnostics. We will document why the innovative noninvasive approach based on microbial metallophores is inherently more sensitive and specific in selected applications than classical clinical standards. We accomplished mass spec data decoding through isotope data filtration in several bacterial and fungal diagnostic success stories.

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16^th May 2023

With honor, I announce Dominika Luptáková as the recipient of the prestigious 2023 Wichterle Award. The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (https://www.avcr.cz/en/) awards the Otto Wichterle Premium to selected, exceptionally high quality and promising scientists of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic who have made outstanding contributions to the development of scientific knowledge, are holders of scientific ranks or titles (CSc., Dr., Ph.D., DrSc., DSc.) and are no older than 35 years of age in the calendar year of submission. The illustrative photo below was shot during the 33rd ECCMID conference.

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4^th May 2023

Most successful extracellular bacterial pathogens displayed on the CDC Bioterrorism List (https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/agentlist-category.asp) actively secret stealth metallophores. Limited metabolomic/metallomic knowledge is available for intracellular pathogens, as concluded in our Functional metallomics talk at the 8th Biological Workshop organized by the Czech Ministry of Defense in Komorni Hradek (May 2-4, 2023). We thank Military Health Institute for the excellent organization of this important international biosafety event on highly virulent agents and their vectors.

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14^th April 2023

On Sunday (Hall C, 11 am), we will show at https://www.eccmid.org/ that sensitivity and specificity in Aspergillus diagnosis drop down in the sequence urine-TafC ~ balf-TafC >> serum-BDG >> serum-GM >> serum-TafC. We also will launch a new prospective study on Aspergillus, into which hospitals may enroll through CASTOR EDC. The study is focused on the host pentraxin 3 (Ptx3) in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and triacetylfusarinine C (TafC) in the patient’s urine.

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21^st March 2023

I am thrilled to share our joint work with Jiří Novák and Kevin Schug (the University of Texas at Arlington) on CycloBranch software, the critical part of mass spectrometry infection metallomics strategy https://doi.org/10.1002/mas.21755. The latest software version https://doi.org/10.1177/14690667231164766 can quantify the metal-containing communication bullets exchanged among the pathogen cells in consortia and host cells. These bullets represent microbial virulence factors and mammalian metallophores, through which the host fights back during infection. On the example of pyoverdine (Pseudomonas aeruginosa metabolite), the paper shows the mathematics used for molecular crosstalk quantitation. The manuscript focuses on Gaussian and two exponentially modified Gaussian functions specifically used if extracted ion chromatograms experienced peak fronting or tailing. The quantitation result is returned by CycloBranch in seconds or minutes, contrary to an hours-long manual approach, prone to user-born errors originating from necessary copying among various software environments. Native Bruker, Waters, Thermo, txt, mgf, mzML, and mzXML data formats are supported in CycloBranch, freely available at https://ms.biomed.cas.cz/cyclobranch.

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15^th March 2023

Some patients have 800 kg, may live far from X-ray scanners, and may develop some form of equine aspergillosis: https://doi.org/10.3390/jof9020161. In the one-health concept and a group of 26 horses, we adopted standard approaches we know from human medical mycology. Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) and serum samples were tested for beta-D-glucan and galactomannan. Gliotoxin was found in the lung tissue and BALF in the fatal invasive aspergillosis case. In guttural pouch aspergillosis cases, two horses positively responded to antimycotic therapies, and the concentration of intracellular and panfungal Aspergillus siderophore, ferricrocin, dropped in the debridement.

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4^th March 2023

Meet Infection Metallomics: https://doi.org/10.1002/mas.21755. With this new analytical concept, we may study the interplay among frenemies in hosts and monitor the dynamic response of a microbiome to antimicrobial therapies. Instrumentally, the concept is built on isotopically-filtered mass spectrometry data (LCMS and imzML formats with fine isotope structure resolution) and enables untargeted metallophore analysis in microbes with understudied metabolomes, metallomes, or limited gene information. Specific isotopic profiles in Fe3+, Zn2+, Cu2+, Ni2+, and other elements make it possible to design new functional studies involving extra and intracellular metallophores relevant, e.g., to lung, central nervous system, or urogenital tract infections.

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21^st February 2023

A. fumigatus has been designated by the WHO as a critical priority fungal pathogen. Learn how to distinguish invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) from Aspergillus colonization: https://doi.org/10.1128/spectrum.04068-22. We found clear associations between phases of fungal development, from conidial germination to the proliferative stage of invasive aspergillosis, and recorded the corresponding changes in secondary metabolite secretion. The in vitro results we then translated to the bedside, and demonstrated that fungal siderophores in urine (a clinical specimen distant from a deep infection site) enable early, specific, and noninvasive diagnosing of patients suffering from IPA. Note the presence of gliotoxin, an essential player in host-guest interactions. Question: Will similar siderophore approaches work for other fungi, bacteria, or mycobacteria?

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16^th February 2023

A new focus on Aspergillus has just been published: https://doi.org/10.3390/antibiotics12020385. We reviewed the current widely used diagnostics and finished by giving a big plug for metabolomics and metallomics. Compared to next‐generation sequencing, PCR with specific DNA probes, galactomannan, and other serology tools, fungal secondary metabolites can provide better indications of the status of live fungal cells with active secondary metabolism rather than circulating pieces of dead fungal bodies or other products. False positivity is excluded as mammalian cells do not synthesize these molecules. False negative rates are lower than those obtained with DNA sequencing and serology since small molecular weight biomarkers have much higher tissue–blood barrier transmission and renal clearance rates than high molecular weight nucleic acid or polysaccharide polymers.

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14^th February 2023

Meet metallophores, specific microbial biomarkers, and virulence factors on which the nextGen infection diagnostic is built: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35942851/. Microorganisms have developed the ability to produce metallophores, which are chelators capable of scavenging metals from hostile environments and transporting essential nutrients into microorganisms to promote their growth, especially in settings where metals are limited. Metallophores (called siderophores if acquiring iron) have diagnostic potential in mammalian hosts. In the complex array of defense mechanisms, the host fights back through the secretion of mammalian siderophores (which include dihydroxybenzoic acids) and proteinaceous lipocalins. In the battle for nutrients, more successful pathogens produce stealth siderophores, thus escaping recognition by lipocalins due to varied siderophore structures and maintaining their chelating function.

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