Metaproteomics is a mass spectrometry method to unbiasedly analyze the proteins expressed by a community of organisms. Stool metaproteomics is an emerging technique for the analysis of microbial protein abundance in human feces. Up to half of the dry solids in stool are bacterial biomass, almost exclusively from the digestive tract, making stool ideal biomaterial to analyze gut microbial proteins, as well as host and dietary proteins and other biomolecules. A recent study from the Gonzalez Lab employed stool metaproteomics to study inflammatory bowel disease, revealing that Bacteroides spp. proteases are elevated in disease and colitis phenotypes can be rescued with protease inhibitor treatment. In this talk, I will be discussing recent advances in stool metaproteomics, including high-throughput workflows, database development, and bioinformatic pipelines. I will also describe how I am addressing persistent limitations in stool metaproteomics and how I am applying this methodology to uncover protein effectors in the gut-brain axis in health and disease. 

The video of this presentation is available here.