Publicaties

Resistance of pathogenic microorganisms against antimicrobials is a major threat to contemporary human society. It necessitates a perpetual influx of novel antimicrobial compounds. More specifically, Gram(-)pathogens emerged as the most exigent danger. In our continuing quest to search for novel antimicrobial molecules, alkaloids from marine fungi show great promise. However, current reports of such newly discovered alkaloids are often limited ...

Chromosomal integration of biosynthetic pathways for the biotechnological production of high-value chemicals is a necessity to develop industrial strains with a high long-term stability and a low production variability. However, the introduction of multiple transcription units into the microbial genome remains a difficult task. Despite recent advances, current methodologies are either laborious or efficiencies highly fluctuate depending on the ...

The struggle of humans versus pathogens is a never ending battle. Since the discovery of antibiotics humans have tipped the scales in their favour, but today bacteria are nullifying this advantage by developing resistance mechanisms against these molecules. The plethora of different antibiotics active against pathogens is shrinking while the discovery of new molecules is arduous. Especially the development of drugs active against GramU+2212 ...

Metabolic engineering of microbial production hosts with long, heterologous pathways strongly increases the burden on a production strain. Thus, genomic stability and robust expression tools (decoupled from the host metabolism and regulation) are key for the creation of robust production strains. Here we describe the development of an orthogonal transcription system using short promoters for Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This system is based on an ...

Although various state-of-the-art metabolic engineering tools are by now well established for Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the introduction of multiple genes in its genome is still a laborious task. Yet, this is crucial for the stable expression of balanced biosynthesis pathways, i.e. for the efficient production of target molecules. To tackle this problem, we are developing a new technique called genomic Serine Integrase Recombinational Assembly ...