Youming Zhang

A portable C-terminal rheostat calibrates RecE/Redα exonuclease activity for enhanced bacterial recombineering

The paper identifies a highly active RecET recombinase pair for efficient homologous recombination in Streptomyces, enabling large DNA integration with minimal homology arms.

Artificial Recombination of Nonribosomal Peptide Synthetases Rapidly Evolves Natural Products

The paper introduces RACE, a method for rapidly evolving NRPSs through recombineering, generating novel peptides and uncovering new recombination sites.

Changing the initiation unit of nonribosomal peptide synthetases to access underexplored biosynthetic potential

This paper introduces a strategy to activate silent NRPS biosynthetic gene clusters by swapping initiation units, successfully recovering three of six previously silent pathways and identifying five novel lipopeptides.