Biosynthesis via Synthetic Biology

具体目标 微生物产生大量具有生物医学和生物技术重要性的天然产物或次生代谢物。然而，这些化合物的发现和可持续生产往往受到我们操纵天然或异源宿主中生物合成基因或簇的能力的限制。为了克服天然产物生物合成研究领域的这一关键限制，拟议研究的总体目标是开发用于发现的合成生物学方法， 微生物中的磷酸天然产物的表征和工程。具体地说，我们将专注于在异源宿主中设计FR-900098和磷霉素的生物合成途径，并开发新的合成生物学方法，从测序的基因组中发现新的磷酸天然产物。

Specific Aims Microorganisms produce a myriad array of natural products or secondary metabolites that are of biomedical and biotechnological importance. However, the discovery and sustainable production of these compounds are often limited by our capability to manipulate the biosynthetic genes or clusters in either the native or the heterologous host. To overcome this key limitation in the natural product biosynthesis research area, the overall goal of the proposed research is to develop synthetic biology approaches for discovery, characterization, and engineering of phosphonic acid natural products in microorganisms. Specifically, we will focus on the engineering of the FR-900098 and fosfomycin biosynthetic pathways in heterologous hosts and development of new synthetic biology approaches for discovery of novel phosphonic acid natural products from sequenced genomes.