Contact
Viggó Marteinsson
Research Group Leader
viggo@matis.is
Summary:
Iceland is located between two water masses: the North Atlantic current and the Greenlandic current. Its location makes it a perfect window of the current ongoing changes due to global warming and how marine microbial diversity is coping with it. After the isolation of marine bacterial strains from the Icelandic marine environment, our goal was to identify the isolates by comparing two different molecular methods. The identification of microorganisms relied for many years on 16S rRNA gene sequencing alone. In recent years, MALDI-TOF Biotyper® has offered an inexpensive and rapid identification method for microbes. However, the available database targets mainly human pathogenic strains. How can microorganisms isolated from the natural environment be identified using MALDI-TOF Biotyper? This chapter describes the creation of a database based on mass spectrometry profiles of bacterial isolates in Icelandic seawaters and considers the reliability of this method.