Biocatalysis

Biocatalysis as inportant tools for synthetic chemists

For the following reasons:

Enzymes display three major types of selectivity:

Chemoselectivity: Since the purpose of an enzyme is to act on a single type of functional group, other sensitive functionalities, which would normally react to a certain extent under chemical catalysis, survive. As a result, biocatalytic reactions tend to be "cleaner" and laborious purification of product(s) from impurities emerging through side-reactions can largely be omitted.

Regioselectivity and diastereoselectivity: Due to their complex three-dimensional structure, enzymes may distinguish between functional groups which are chemically situated in different regions of the substrate molecule.

Enantioselectivity: Since almost all enzymes are made from L-amino acids, enzymes are chiral catalysts. As a consequence, any type of chirality present in the substrate molecule is "recognized" upon the formation of the enzyme-substrate complex. Thus a prochiral substrate may be transformed into an optically active product and both enantiomers of a racemic substrate may react at different rates.

These are important mainly due to the need to synthesise enantiopure compounds as chiral building blocks for drugs and agrochemicals. Another important advantage of biocatalysts are that they act under mild conditions, which minimizes problems of undesired side-reactions such as decomposition, isomerization, racemization and rearrangement, which often plague traditional methodology. We can supply a wide range of these tools

Immobilised Enzymes & Special Proteins