My research project at Freie Universität Berlin follows the successful cooperation of the team of Prof. Timo Niedermeyer and the team of Dr. Jan Mareš from Institute of Hydrobiology CAS in the field of cyanobacterial secondary metabolites. I am determining novel cyanobacterial producers of dolastatins living in newly established freshwater habitats, post mining lakes of north-west of Bohemia and the responsible biosynthetic gene clusters in the producers’ genomes. My second aim is to elucidate the actual physiological function of dolastatins for the organism itself, introducing the infamous toxic freshwater cyanobacterium Aetokthonos hydrillicola as a model organism.