Non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) are the origin of aw ide range of natural products,i ncluding many clinically used drugs.Efficient engineering of these often giant biosynthetic machineries to produce novel non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs) is an ongoing challenge.H ere we describe ac loning and co-expression strategy to functionally combine NRPS fragments of Gram-negative and -positive origin, synthesising novel peptides at titres up to 220 mg L À1 .E xtending from the recently introduced definition of eXchange Units (XUs), we inserted synthetic zippers (SZs) to split single protein NRPSs into independently expressed and translated polypeptide chains.T hese synthetic type of NRPS (type S) enables easier access to engineering,o vercomes cloning limitations,a nd provides as imple and rapid approach to building peptide libraries via the combination of different NRPS subunits.