Title：In vivo Incorporation of Non-canonical Amino Acids for the Chemical Diversification of Lantibiotics

Jingjing Deng, room 5172.648 tel 32102 email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Introduction

 Antimicrobial resistance has become one of the most serious public health concerns worldwide. This daunting perspective has been the target of many research efforts into conventional antibiotics and alternative approaches. Interest in peptide-based therapeutics has greatly increased in recent years and synthetic peptide drugs increasingly reached the clinic in all major disease fields. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are valuable alternatives to antibiotics because they have many properties (e.g. significant potency, high stability, low toxicity, and low propensity to generate resistance) that make them suitable for clinical applications. Lantibiotics are ribosomally synthesized and post-translational modified peptides (RiPPs). Their ribosomal synthesis and enzymatic modifications provide excellent opportunities to design and generate a large variety of novel antimicrobial peptides. One of the approach to achieve a larger chemical diversity in lantibiotics is the incorporation of non-canonical amino acids (ncAAs) in vivo. In my research, different ncAAs were incorporated into lantibiotics using auxotrophic host strain Lactococcus lactis.

Techniques

-Molecular cloning techniques
-Expression and purification of peptides
-Mass spectrometry and data analysis
-Antimicrobial activity assays