Ilia Kats

One of our team members, the secret chief-nerd of our group, Ilia Kats had the initial idea for our project and inspired us all with his dream of easy and fast recycling of gold. He also came up with the concept to exploit the NRPS modularity for setting up the NRPS designer.
Besides all of his brain work Ilia was indispensable for all of the wetlab work for the different sub projects. He was single-handedly responsible for cloning the methylmalonyl-CoA patwhay for the delftibactin project. In the Tyrocidine and indigoidine subproject he was involved in the pilot experiments. And last but not least, his programming skills were essential for the successful implementation of our NRPS-Designer software where he used his supernatural force to eliminate even the toughest bugs.
A big THANK U from the whole team for the inspiration and great humor.

Gold Recycling
Delftibactin

The cloning strategies and amplification of the Del-cluster were in general performed and developed by Florian Schmidt, Sophie Rabe, Nils Kurzawa and Johanna Meichsner. The experiments started with the amplification of DelH executed by Johanna Meichsner which turned out to be one of the most challenging parts of our project. Johanna proved to be extremely resilient to recurrent setbacks and her power of endurance gave a great example to the whole team. Florian Schmidt, Sophie Rabe and Nils Kurzawa took care of the plasmid assembly of the other genes from the Del-cluster. After DelRest was succesfully amplified Florian Schmidt and Sophie Rabe worked as well on the plasmid creation of DelH. Sophie Rabe had also the responsibility of proteins assays, delftibactin purification and Maldi-TOF. All of them were extremely dedicated to their work and happily cloned day and night.
Ilia Kats cloned the pIK8 plasmid and all prior plasmids necessary for the establishment of the methylmalonyl-CoA pathway. He performed all steps of the cloning procedure of these plasmids from primer design up to electroporation and screening.
Here we want to give a special thank you to our advisors Dominik Niopek, Fanny Georgi and Katharina Genreith for their great help in planning the cloning strategies and introducing us to the world of primer design!

Module Shuffling
Tyrocidine

The main focus of this project was to demonstrate the feasibility of NRPS module shuffling. This was performed by Anja Riedel, Philipp Walch, Tania Christiansen and Joshua Sachs. They established the experimental strategy and designed all corresponding primers needed for the amplification of the different Tyc modules. Tania Christiansen was especially responsible for the BioBrick submission and the cloning of the fragments into the needed RFCs. Anja Riedel took care of the linker variation and Philipp Walch performed the indigoidine-valin and indigoidine-ornithine tags.
Another essential part in the Tyrocidine project was the mass spectrometry where Joshua Sachs was in charge. The ccDB-construct was generated by Philipp Walch and Joshua Sachs. Everyone in this group contributed to the great success of the project part! Here, we want to thank our advisor Lorenz Adlung who often helped us with his experience which he shared in frequent lab-meetings discussions.