Bioengineering

Improved understanding of lanthipeptide biosynthesis has permitted bioengineering of both the mature lantibiotics and their synthases. Lanthipeptide synthases with broad substrate specificity have been successfully employed in our lab to process non-endogenous substrates and generate combinatorial peptide libraries. In this vein, our lab is interested in expanding the bioactivities and affinities of lanthipeptides by developing selection platforms for lanthipeptide variants. These platforms include yeast display and phage display to identify peptides that can be used as protein-protein interaction inhibitors.