Synthetic Biology

Microbial production workflow
Microbial production workflow

Most high-value chemicals that society relies on such as medicines are synthesized using petroleum-derived precursors. With the emerging field of synthetic biology, microbial production is now (more than ever) an attractive alternative to generate not only molecules found in nature (natural product) but also to expand the chemical diversity of biological systems (1, 2). Among the topics encompassed by synthetic biology, we are particularly interested in access to, and engineering and production of complex natural products using heterologous expression (3-6).

References from our laboratory

  1. Kunakom S, Eustáquio AS* (2019) Natural products and synthetic biology – where we are and where we need to go. mSystems 4: e00113-19.
  2. Romanowski S, Eustáquio AS* (2020) Synthetic biology for natural product drug production and engineering. Curr Opin Chem Biol 58:137-145.
  3. Kunakom S, Eustáquio AS* (2020) Heterologous production of lasso peptide capistruin in a Burkholderia host. ACS Synth Biol 9:241-248.
  4. Fernandez HN, Kretsch AM, Kunakom S, Kadjo AE, Mitchell DA, Eustáquio AS* (2024) High-Yield Lasso Peptide Production in a Burkholderia Bacterial Host by Plasmid Copy Number Engineering. ACS Synth Biol 13:337-350.
  5. Adaikpoh BI, Romanowski SB, Eustáquio AS* (2023) Understanding Autologous Spliceostatin Transcriptional Regulation to Derive Parts for Heterologous Expression in a Burkholderia Bacterial Host. ACS Synth Biol 12:1952-1960.
  6. Kadjo AE, Eustáquio AS* (2023) Bacterial natural product discovery by heterologous expression. J Ind Microbiol Biotechnol 50:kuad044.