1. (A) A needle was used to scrape off small amounts of material from 110 locations from the original piece of lichen.
(A) A needle was used to scrape off small amounts of material from 110 locations from the original piece of lichen. UHPLC-MS/MS data were acquired on these materials, and data analysis was performed using the online analysis infrastructure GNPS. (B) A 2.5-mm by 1.8-mm by 3-mm piece of lichen was sectioned from the original lichen piece (1.8 cm by 3 cm). This section was embedded in gelatin, and MALDI IMS data were acquired on three layers, the sun-exposed layer, the middle layer, and the bottom layer, to reveal metabolite distributions in false color. (C) The Venn diagram on the left shows the percentage of molecules detected in lichen that are of either fungal or bacterial origin. This Venn diagram is scaled to demonstrate the number of features detected. The origin was assigned by identifying common molecules in the MS/MS data acquired on the lichen and microbes cultured from this lichen. The Venn diagram on the right shows percentages of common molecules among lichen, cultured microbial isolates, and public data sets on soil fungi as well as freshwater cyanobacteria.
Neha Garg et al. mSystems 2016; doi: /mSystems