Piel Lab

Research focus

ERC Advanced Grant · 2016

Tailored chemical complexity through evolution-inspired synthetic biology

Creating true molecular complexity in a modular, combinatorial fashion is one of the great visions in applied enzymology and chemistry. Nature achieves this feat by using modular biosynthetic enzymes. These microbial proteins generate many of the most important natural products of therapeutic value, including antiinfective, anticancer, and immunosuppressive agents. To construct such compounds, each enzyme module incorporates and often modifies one building block in an assembly line-like process. Among the known modular enzymes, the recently discovered trans-acyltransferase polyketide synthases (trans-AT PKSs) exhibit an unparalleled biosynthetic diversity and tendency to form extensively…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.