A new preprint co-authored by Dr. Maria L. Marco (UC Davis Department of Food Science & Technology) presents microbiomeMASST—a searchable platform designed to connect microbial metabolites across hundreds of public datasets.
Microbiome research has generated thousands of metabolite discoveries over the past decade. Yet many of these findings remain confined to individual studies, making it difficult to understand where else a molecule appears, which microbes may produce it, and whether it is relevant across different diets, diseases, or host species.
microbiomeMASST addresses this challenge by linking MS/MS spectra to harmonized study metadata across 467 public studies and more than 144,000 metabolomics files.
The result is an interactive, network-based framework that allows researchers to explore where a molecule has been detected across hosts, tissues, microbial cultures, interventions, and environments.
As a proof of concept, the authors show how the platform can trace complex bile acid metabolites to specific bacterial producers and follow their presence across human and animal samples. They also identify a case in which gut microbes chemically modify the antihypertensive drug enalapril in a way that removes its inhibitory activity, highlighting how microbial metabolism may influence therapeutic response. By integrating dispersed metabolomics datasets into a unified, searchable system, microbiomeMASST provides a powerful resource for advancing microbiome science and accelerating hypothesis generation.
