Non-Ribosomal Peptide Synthetases in Cyanobacteria : A Search for Domains

Non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) are highly refined natural machines for the biosynthesis of secondary oligopeptides which cannot be synthesised by the ribosomal machinery. Due to the attractive biological potential of many of these secondary metabolites, a great interest to investigate these systems for further exploitation and understanding have taken place in recent years. Because of the relative linear modular structure of NRPSs, they have become potential targets for combinatorial manipulations to reprogram the natural peptides to aid in the discovery of improved and more active peptides. Cyanobacteria are a rich source of these secondary metabolites, and have been found to be one of the oldest living organisms which have developed these biosynthetic pathways. Genetic elucidation of these pathways has been described by a large body of literature for the past two decades; yet there are only a few completely described biosynthetic pathways. Within this work, a method to use inter- adenylation domainal consensus primers to obtain the whole gene cluster with simple molecular techniques is described.