Design, biosynthesis and testing of neonatural products

Natural sources have been highly important for the discovery of new drugs, offering compounds that possess exciting and potent bioactivities. The development of many promising natural products is significantly hampered by the difficulties associated with the synthesis of novel analogs. The family of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptide (RiPP) natural products offers a plethora of different, promising bioactivities and highly diverse scaffolds. This project will develop interchangeable leader technology (ILP), which was invented in my group, to produce libraries of neo-natural RiPPs in vivo and test these for bioactivity. It will involve the full range of common molecular biology techniquesas well as advanced aspects of bioengineering, genetic engineering and biochemical assay.