Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 28, 2026

An Aquatic Microbial Metaproteomics Workflow: From Cells to Tryptic Peptides Suitable for Tandem Mass Spectrometry-based Analysis
Published on: September 15, 2015
Metaproteomics: extracting and mining proteome information to characterize metabolic activities in microbial
Paul E Abraham1, Richard J Giannone1, Weili Xiong1,2
1Chemical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Abstract:
Contemporary microbial ecology studies usually employ one or more "omics" approaches to investigate the structure and function of microbial communities. Among these, metaproteomics aims to characterize the metabolic activities of the microbial membership, providing a direct link between the genetic potential and functional metabolism. The successful deployment of metaproteomics research depends on the integration of high-quality experimental and bioinformatic techniques for uncovering the metabolic activities of a microbial community in a way that is complementary to other "meta-omic" approaches. The essential, quality-defining informatics steps in metaproteomics investigations are: (1) construction of the metagenome, (2) functional annotation of predicted protein-coding genes, (3) protein database searching, (4) protein inference, and (5) extraction of metabolic information. In this article, we provide an overview of current bioinformatic approaches and software implementations in metaproteome studies in order to highlight the key considerations needed for successful implementation of this powerful community-biology tool.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Proteomics
Proteomics is the study of proteomes' function. It involves the large-scale systematic study of the proteome to denote the protein complement expressed by a genome. Scientist Mark Wilkins coined the term...
Methods to Assess Microbial Communities
Amino Acid Catabolism

