Editorial: Navigating the microbial landscape: integrating mass spectrometry imaging and other multimodal imaging approaches for spatially resolved microbial studies

Abstract

contributions that advance precisely this capacity, uniting mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) and complementary multimodal imaging approaches in service of spatially resolved microbial science.The four articles assembled here span the breadth of this emerging field, from foundational method development to clinical application. Situating these methodological and clinical advances within a broader biological framework, Meyers et al. provide a comprehensive review of the microbiome's role in cancer metastasis, surveying how specific bacterial taxa, including Fusobacterium nucleatum, Bacteroides fragilis, and Helicobacter pylori, may influence four key steps of the metastatic cascade through direct invasion, toxin secretion, and immune modulation. Critically, the review argues that resolving the microbiome's contribution to metastatic progression requires moving beyond compositional profiling toward spatially-resolved approaches. This includes MALDI-MSI, DESI-MSI, NanoSIMS, imaging mass cytometry, and spatial transcriptomics workflows that can map microbial communities, their metabolites, and their interactions with host cells directly within the tumor microenvironment.Taken together, these four contributions articulate a unifying conviction at the heart of this Research Topic: that the biology of microorganisms is inseparable from their spatial and molecular context, and that imaging technologies, specificically MSI and complementary multimodal imaging, are the instruments that make that context achievable. Whether the objective is to map a metabolite to a bacterial niche in the gut, to capture the metabolic signature of a pathogen in a living host cell, to identify an organism from a clinical isolate, or to chart the microbiome's influence across the stages of metastasis, each paper demonstrates that spatial resolution and molecular specificity are not technical luxuries but scientific necessities. This Research Topic reflects a broader shift in approaching the Biology of Microbes: from cataloguing the microbiome "who is present?", to understanding "where everybody is", "what they are doing", and, ultimately, "how microbial activities shape the biological systems and environment they inhabit".