Engineering of model organisms such as Escherichia coli or Bacillus subtilis are historically grown and are utilized for many purposes. But other unconventional microbes are highly promising based on their native product or substrate spectra.

I will present our recent efforts in engineering of e.g. Xanthomonas campestris and Paenibacillus polymyxa for the production of monomers and polymers such as 2,3-butandiol or exopolysaccharides. We develop and use strain specific and broad host molecular biological tools for the efficient engineering of these organisms and apply high throughput analytics for the product characterization in the case of exopolysaccharides and variants thereof. We develop chassis organisms for the production of tailored polysaccharides and optimize the bioprocess up to the 500 L scale. I will give an overview of our past and recent work.