Intracellular signals might trigger the biosynthesis of not yet discovered natural products. The technology of expression monitoring, analysis and control will be applied to improve the biosynthesis of tools for the screening of natural products and their biotechnological production. In addition, we are developing E. coli as host for the screening of natural products which act as mediators in signal transduction pathways. In addition, some proteins which are not expressed in S. cerevisiae are expressible in E. coli . For E. coli , suicide cassettes containing multicopy-vectors with high segregational and structural stability, even at high cell densities, were constructed.
Basic research is done on the fluidity of biomembranes.
We found evidence that the cyclopropane fatty acid synthase is a key enzyme regulating membrane fluidity. Our investigations about protein-lipid interplays are useful for recombinant protein transport. In addition, strains were derived from prototrophic strains with improved characteristics for HCDC, i.e. strains with reduced accumulation of detrimental by-products and strains with improved folding characteristics for recombinant proteins. This new accessory uses signals from luciferases synthesized in the cells if recombinant proteins accumulate in misfolded state. Fed-batch strategies to prevent misfolding are outlined below.