Protein engineering expression improvement

Since the reaction is taking place within the (chiral) active site of the enzyme, the reaction mechanism is stereospecific, the addition of H2 occurring with antistereochemistry. There is only one exception reported, the syn-hydrogenation of verbenone, carvone, and cyclohex-2-enone catalyzed by OYE of Nicotiana tabacum (Scheme 2.3) [12]. However, the aforementioned tremendous advances in molecular biology and biotechnology will facilitate recombinant expression and synthetic use of these novel biocatalysts by protein engineering. In this respect, recent examples already report structure-driven mutagenesis, which successfully improved reaction specificity or enantioselectivity [13,14]. 

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