Synbio Lantibiotics

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What they say about it

(Multi)drug resistance is an increasing problem in our societies. Lantibiotics are lanthionine-stabilized antibiotics produced by a variety of microorganisms. Because they use docking molecules of the target bacteria, they are often effective in nanomolar concentrations. Source

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How they say it works

Because of the rapidly expanding amount of genomic data, it now becomes possible to screen hundreds of genomes for lantibiotic gene clusters. This allows selecting a high number of undescribed and silent lantibiotics. We use a synthetic biology approach to produce mainly silent, i.e. non-expressed in common growth media, lantibiotics from various genetic sources (>500 genomes). We have previously demonstrated that the overexpressed NisBTC complex can dehydrate and install ring structures in virtually any peptide sequence provided that it is fused to the nisin leader sequence, including production of heterologous lantibiotics (Majchrzykiewitcz et al. 2008). The in silico selected silent lantibiotic structural genes will be synthesized and fused to the leader sequence of nisin present in a tailor-made vector to direct the chimeric peptides to the broadly applicable nisin modification machinery (NisBTC) in Lactococcus lactis. A thorough testing of the peptides against a library of target organisms will take place, including an initial screen for mode of action analysis. Source

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Synbio Components
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www.rug.nl