Due to the fast turn-over of today’s high-tech equipment, millions of tons of electronic waste accumulate each year. It contains tons of gold which is very valuable to the society, not only because of its use in jewelry but also for medical applications. The main approach nowadays is to recycle gold by electrolysis which is highly inefficient and expensive, preventing most of the gold from being recovered. In our project we worked on finding a more efficient and environmentally friendly method to recover this precious metal:

• We managed to recover gold from electronic waste using delftibactin, a NRP produced by Delftia acidovorans
• We managed to clone all genes needed for delftibactin production into E. coli
• We managed to recombinantly express the NRPS responsible for delftibactin production in E. coli

Indigoidine is a blue pigment produced by the NRPS module indC. We fused indC with other NRPS modules to yield an assembly line producing peptides labelled with the Indigoidine-Tag. This procedure opens up the possibility for the high-throughput generation of combinatorial NRPS libraries due to its simplicity in assembly, detection, validation and purification. We propose such high-throughput protocols in our RFC100. We optimized the indigoidine synthetase by replacing single domains with both domains from NRPS modules and fully synthetic domains and coexpression with different enzymes required for NRPS activation (see Tag-Optimization).

Software: NRPSDesigner

Features:

• User input: A desired peptide consisting of more than 50 amino acids with different chirality, which are currently present in our database
• The software calculates a NRPS domain sequence, composed of domains from different species, which is capable of producing the desired non-ribosomal peptide
• Via the integrated Software "Gibthon", a former iGEM project, a Gibson cloning strategy is designed
• to make sure our tool can be used beyond this years iGEM competition we furthermore implemented the possibility of adding new domains to our database by entering a DNA sequence
• On the basis of this DNA sequence a domain prediction is carried out, which is based on antismash2
• This de facto enables everyone to design his or her non-ribosomal peptide of interest!

The aim of science and synthetic biology in particular is to improve lives by solving problems. We as researchers (-to-be) are therefore working for society. Yet, we can only offer solutions, which have to be approved and applied by the public.

We as iGEM Team Heidelberg have therefore put great effort in communicating with many groups within society to open minds, broaden horizons as well as minimize prejudices and concerns:

• Involving experts
• Engaging the broad public
• Getting inspired by artists
• Intruiging the next generation of scientists

And finally bringing them all together to an open talk evening addressing the question "On the Way to a Synthetic Future?"