Funding: European Science Foundation
Duration: 1.8.2010 – 31.7.2013

The ESF-funded SYNMOD project (lead by Prof. O. Kuipers, University of Groningen, NL) joins different european scientific groups to use synthetic biology for the design and production of novel antibiotic molecules from the group of lantibiotics. For this, more than 30 sub-molecular modules have been selected and will be recombined to obtain new functions. As there is so far no reliable molecular shuffling techniques available to combine such short DNA fragments without using conserved sequences between them, we established a new gene synthesis protocol for the seamless combinatorial synthesis of several libraries. To support the establishment of new lantibiotic production pathways, we also set up a collection of mutagenized expression elements, specifically promoters, terminators, and intergenic regions.