Ribosomal Route to small molecule diversity

This is an interesting article about engineering the Ribosomal peptide pathway, that makes different kind of natural products, to include unnatural amino acids. Specifically, they are interested in making new types of cyanobactins. The need to diversify macrocycles is important for the drug and pharmaceutical industries. Though this is novel, the synthesis of these peptides may be just as easy. A enzyme at the end could just cyclize the peptide. That would be similar to the NRPS work we have seen in Gavin's class. This technology seems very useful for a known drug or scaffold that needs to be massed produced. I sometimes forget that UAA incorporation can be used for more than just large proteins.