• KSBB Journal
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.362-365
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• 2007

Cyanobacteria have been identified as one of the most promising group producing novel biochemically active natural products. Cyanobacteria are a very old group of prokaryotic organisms that produce very diverse secondary metabolites, especially non-ribosomal peptide and polyketide structures. Large multienzyme complexes which are responsible for the non-ribosomal biosynthesis of peptides are modular for the addition of a single amino acid. An activation of amino acid substrates results in an amino adenylate occuring via an adenylation domain (A-domain). A-domains are responsible for the recognition of amino acids as substrates within NP synthesis. The A-domain contains ten conserved motifs, A1 to A10. In this study, ten conserved motifs from A1 to A10 were checked regarding their amino acid sequence of the NRPS-module of Microcystis aeruginosa PCC 7806. The part of the amino acid sequence chosen was that which contained as many conserved motives as possible, and then these amino sequence were compared between other cyanobacteria to design a new degenerate primer. A new degenerate primer (A3/A7 primer) was designed to detect any putative NP synthetase region in unkwon cyanobacteria by a reverse translation of the conserved amino acid sequence and a search for cyanobacterial DNA bank.