Fundamentals and Analytical Strategies for Metabolomics Workflow: An Overview and Microbial Applications

Abstract

Metabolomics has become a prominent area within the omics sciences and allows an understanding of complex biological systems. Among several areas of knowledge, the study of microorganisms (microbial metabolomics) has received attention. Due to the many species of microorganisms and their high metabolic complexity, many challenges are involved in metabolomics workflow. Careful experimental design and execution of the experiments will provide reliable results, allowing correct biological interpretation. This review presents the fundamentals of metabolomics and workflow, focusing on the description of the steps and analytical strategies applied to microbial sample preparation, highlighting the current challenges in sample handling. In addition, the state of the art of analytical technologies based on separation techniques hyphenated to mass spectrometry and applications in microbial metabolomics are presented.