MALDI-FISH for Colocalization of Brominated Metabolites and Pseudovibrio spp. in Aplysina Tissue

Bromotyrosine-containing natural products have been isolated
from
marine sponges. While studying the uptake of engineered bacterial
strains by sponges, we observed the production of fistularin-3 in
the sponge. To explore these results, we employed multimodal imaging
to colocalize metabolites with fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH)
probes. Using mass spectrometry imaging (MSI), we measured fistularin-3
and mapped this against the FISH probes to locate the bacteria. A
recent study reported that P. brasiliensis produced
fistularin-3 in pure culture, but these data have not yet been reproduced.
We employed MSI and FISH to colocalize the fistularin-3 spatial distribution
with P. brasiliensis in sponge tissue.