Metabolomic profiling reveals bacterial metabolic adaptation strategies and new metabolites

How has metabolomics helped our understanding of infectious diseases? With the threat of antimicrobial resistance to human health around the world, metabolomics has emerged as a powerful tool to comprehensively characterize metabolic pathways to identify new drug targets. However, its output is constrained to known metabolites and their metabolic pathways. Recent advances in instrumentation, methodologies, and computational mass spectrometry have accelerated the use of metabolomics to understand pathogen-host metabolic interactions. This short review discusses a selection of recent publications using metabolomics in infectious/bacterial diseases. These studies unravel the links between metabolic adaptations to environments and host metabolic responses. Moreover, they highlight the importance of enzyme function and metabolite characterization in identifying new drug targets and biomarkers, as well as precision medicine in monitoring therapeutics and diagnosing diseases.