Establishment and application of techniques for microbial metabolomics Analytische Chemie Staphylococcus aureus Bacillus Stoffwechselphysiologie metabolom NMR HPLC MS With the development of new functional genomics methods that can access the whole genome transcriptome proteome and metabolome more comprehensive insights in cellular processes are possible. Largely based on these advances our knowledge about molecular constituents for many organisms is increasing at a tremendous rate. Until today the genomes of several organisms including pathogenic bacteria are already sequenced and pave the way for metabolic network constructions. Interest in metabolomics the global profiling of metabolites in a cell tissue or organism has been rapidly increased. A range of analytical techniques including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC MS) liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC MS) Fourier Transform mass spectrometry (FT MS) high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) are required in order to maximize the number of metabolites that can be identified in a matrix. With the help of microbial metabolomics (qualification and quantification of a huge variety of metabolites from a bacterium) deciphering of the bacterial metabolism is feasible. The metabolome pipeline or workflow encompasses the processes of (i) sample generation and preparation (ii) establishment of analytical techniques (iii) collection of analytical data raw data pre processing (iv) data analysis and (v) data integration into biological questions. The present work contributes to the above mentioned steps in a metabolomics workflow. A specific focus was set to the exo and endometabolome analysis of Gram positive bacteria