Uusia antimikrobisia peptidejä synteettisen biologian avulla

Antimicrobial resistance is a threat to public health worldwide. There is an urgent need for new antibiotics. Here we will develop a new way of producing antimicrobial peptides through genetic engineering. We hope to discover new antibiotics by exploiting the genetic resources of a group of bacteria called cyanobacteria. It has been known for a long time that these bacteria make powerful toxins and antimicrobial peptides which cannot be easily synthesized chemically. These bacteria are also slow growing and produce low amounts of peptides. This is often a bottleneck in drug discovery and development. Through genetic engineering we will increase the amount of these valuable peptides in surrogate microbial hosts and shorten the growth times. This will allow us to study how the peptides are made in nature and how we can exploit bacteria to produce new antimicrobial peptides needed to fight disease in the future.