Environmentally benign production biocatalysts

Compared to synthetic catalysts, enzymes have many advantages. First of all, being natural products, they are environmentally benign and therefore their use does not meet pubhc opposition. Enzymes act at atmospheric pressure, ambient temperature, and at pH between 4 and 9, thus avoiding extreme conditions, which might result in undesired side reactions. Enzymes are extremely selective (see below). There are also, of course, some drawbacks of biocatalysts. For example, enzymes are known in only one enantiomeric form, as they consist of natural enantiomeric (homochiral) amino acids their possible modifications are difficult to achieve (see Section 5.3.2) they are prone to deactivation owing to inappropriate operation parameters and to inhibition phenomena. 

Aside from the multifaceted chemical conversions, there are sources to develop into industrially viable microbial conversions. 1,2,4-Butanetriol, for example, used as an intermediate chemical for alkyd resins and rocket fuels, is currently prepared commercially from malic acid by high-pressure hydrogenation or hydride reduction of its methyl ester. In a novel environmentally benign approach to this chemical, wood-derived D-xylose is microbially oxidized to D-xylonic acid, followed by a multistep conversion to the product effected by a biocatalyst specially engineered by inserting Pseudomonas putida plasmids into E. coli ... 

The desire for a sustainable development in chemistry lays the foundation for environmentally benign processes. From the view point of organic chemistry, the construction of carbon skeletons plays the pivotal role. The extraordinarily mild reaction conditions in addition to the non-toxic and non-bumable properties and ubiquitous availability of water as the reaction medium make enzyme-catalyzed C-C-bond formation the first choice even for industrial production. Thanks to subtle selectivity features of the corresponding enzymes a rather broad range in substrate specificity meets with a highly conserved stereospecificity at the newly connected carbon centers. In addition, these features and the availability of the respective biocatalysts are open to intervention by recombinant genetechnological techniques. 

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