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Lanthipeptides have extensive therapeutic and industrial applications. However, because many are bactericidal, traditional in vivo platforms are limited in their capacity to discover and mass produce novel lanthipeptides as bacterial organisms are often critical components in these systems. Herein, the development of a cell‐free protein synthesis (CFPS) platform that enables rapid genome mining, screening, and guided overproduction of lanthipeptides in vivo is described. For proof‐of‐concept studies, a type I lanthipeptide, nisin, is selected. Four novel lanthipeptides with antibacterial activity are identified among all nisin analogs in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database in a single day. Further, the CFPS platform is coupled with a screening assay for anti‐gram‐negative bacteria growth, resulting in the identification of a potent nisin mutant, M5. The titers of nisin and the nisin analog are found to be improved with CFPS platform guidance. Owing to the similarities in biosynthesis, the CFPS platform is broadly applicable to other lanthipeptides, thereby providing a universal method for lanthipeptide discovery and overproduction.

The phase-field method coupled with the Navier-Stokes equations is a rather new approach for scale-resolving numerical simulation of interfacial two-phase flows. The intention is to implement it as finite-volume method in the open source library for computational continuum mechanics OpenFOAM and make it freely available. An overview on the governing equations is given and the numerical method is shortly discussed. The focus is on application and validation of the code for some fundamental wetting phenomena, namely the capillary rise in a narrow channel and the spreading of a droplet on a flat surface, which is chemically homogeneous or regularly patterned. The numerical results on static meshes agree well with analytical solutions and experimental/numerical results from literature. Also, first 3D finite-volume simulations with adaptive mesh refinement near the interface are presented as a key element to achieve CPU-time efficient simulations.

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The effective mechanical and acoustic properties of two-dimensional pentamode metamaterials (PMs) with different structural parameters are investigated in this paper. It is found that with varying structural parameters, the effective bulk modulus and density remain constant as the same as those of water, while the figure of merit, i.e., the ratio of the bulk modulus to the shear modulus (B/G) gradually increases due to the decrease of the shear modulus. However, full wave simulations reveal that with the increase of B/G, the acoustic scattering becomes more and more intense, which indicates that the acoustic properties of pentamode metamaterials gradually deviate from those of water. These anomalous acoustic behaviors are proposed to arise from the existence of the bending modes in pentamode microstructures. Our results show that for pentamode metamaterials, the mechanical properties cannot be simply translated to their acoustic properties, and the structural parameters affect the mechanical and acoustic properties in much different ways.