RFC 100: Standard for Synthesis of Customized Peptides by Non-Ribosomal Peptide Synthetases

With this RFC, we introduce a standardized framework for the production of short synthetic peptides by engineering customizable non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS). The framework consists of the NRPSDesigner, a software tool for the in silico design of user-defined NRPSs, a platform for standardized cloning and expression of NRPSs in different bacterial hosts (please refer to our RFC 99 below) and a quality control procedure for the easy validation of NRP production.

RFC 100 combines the advantages of chemical and recombinant peptide synthesis: it enables the incorporation of hundreds of non-proteinogenic amino acids into the synthetic peptides and is at the same time easily scalable and thus applicable for industrial peptide production. Thus it highly facilitates the production of peptide-based antibiotics, detoxifying agents or chelators applicable for recycling of precious metals from electronic waste. We believe, that RFC 100 represents not only a great foundational advance in the synthetic peptide production field but could become a new gold standard for recombinant peptide production within the synthetic biology community.