Ausdehnung des Enzym-Universums: Zugang zu nicht-natürlichen Reaktionen durch mechanismusgeleitete, gerichtete Evolution

Unlocking New Reactivities in Enzymes by Iminium Catalysis

The application of biocatalysis in conquering challenging synthesis requires the constant input of new enzymes. Developing novel biocatalysts by absorbing catalysis modes from synthetic chemistry has yielded fruitful new-to-nature enzymes. Organocatalysis was originally bio-inspired and has become the third pillar of asymmetric catalysis. Transferring organocatalytic reactions back to enzyme platforms is a promising approach for biocatalyst creation. Herein, we summarize recent developments in the design of novel biocatalysts that adopt iminium catalysis, a fundamental branch in organocatalysis. By repurposing existing enzymes or constructing artificial enzymes, various biocatalysts for iminium catalysis have been created and optimized via protein engineering to promote valuable abiological transformations. Recent advances in iminium biocatalysis illustrate the power of combining chemomimetic biocatalyst design and directed evolution to generate useful new-to-nature enzymes.

Biocatalytic Alkylation Chemistry: Building Molecular Complexity with High Selectivity

Biocatalysis has traditionally been viewed as a field that primarily enables access to chiral centers. This includes the synthesis of chiral alcohols, amines and carbonyl compounds, often through functional group interconversion via hydrolytic or oxidation-reduction reactions. This limitation is partly being overcome by the design and evolution of new enzymes. Here, we provide an overview of a recently thriving research field that we summarize as biocatalytic alkylation chemistry. In the past 3-4 years, numerous new enzymes have been developed that catalyze sp3 C-C/N/O/S bond formations. These enzymes utilize different mechanisms to generate molecular complexity by coupling simple fragments with high activity and selectivity. In many cases, the engineered enzymes perform reactions that are difficult or impossible to achieve with current small-molecule catalysts such as organocatalysts and transition-metal complexes. This review further highlights that the design of new enzyme function is particularly successful when off-the-shelf synthetic reagents are utilized to access non-natural reactive intermediates. This underscores how biocatalysis is gradually moving to a field that build molecules through selective bond forming reactions.

Enzyme Catalysis in Non-Native Environment with Unnatural Selectivity Using Polymeric Nanoreactors

The utilization of enzymes for catalysis in organic solvents, while exhibiting selectivity to different substrates, is a big challenge. We report an amphiphilic random copolymer system that self-assembles with enzymes in an organic solvent to form nanoreactors. These encapsulated enzymes are not denatured and they do preserve the catalytic activity. The cross-linkable functional groups in the hydrophobic compartments of the polymers offer to control accessibility to the enzyme. This varied accessibility due to the polymer host, rather than the enzyme itself, endows the nanoreactor with an unnatural selectivity. The findings here highlight the significant potential of simple polymer-based enzyme nanoreactors to execute selective organic reactions under non-native conditions.

Practical Enzymatic Production of Carbocycles

The Pd-catalyzed carbon-carbon bond formation pioneered by Heck in 1969 has dominated medicinal chemistry development for the ensuing fifty years. As the demand for more complex three-dimensional active pharmaceuticals continues to increase, preparative enzyme-mediated assembly, by virtue of its exquisite selectivity and sustainable nature, is poised to provide a practical and affordable alternative for accessing such compounds. In this minireview, we summarize recent state-of-the-art developments in practical enzyme-mediated assembly of carbocycles. When appropriate, background information on the enzymatic transformation is provided and challenges and/or limitations are also highlighted.

Generation of Oxidoreductases with Dual Alcohol Dehydrogenase and Amine Dehydrogenase Activity

The l-lysine-ϵ-dehydrogenase (LysEDH) from Geobacillus stearothermophilus naturally catalyzes the oxidative deamination of the ϵ-amino group of l-lysine. We previously engineered this enzyme to create amine dehydrogenase (AmDH) variants that possess a new hydrophobic cavity in their active site such that aromatic ketones can bind and be converted into α-chiral amines with excellent enantioselectivity. We also recently observed that LysEDH was capable of reducing aromatic aldehydes into primary alcohols. Herein, we harnessed the promiscuous alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) activity of LysEDH to create new variants that exhibited enhanced catalytic activity for the reduction of substituted benzaldehydes and arylaliphatic aldehydes to primary alcohols. Notably, these novel engineered dehydrogenases also catalyzed the reductive amination of a variety of aldehydes and ketones with excellent enantioselectivity, thus exhibiting a dual AmDH/ADH activity. We envisioned that the catalytic bi-functionality of these enzymes could be applied for the direct conversion of alcohols into amines. As a proof-of-principle, we performed an unprecedented one-pot "hydrogen-borrowing" cascade to convert benzyl alcohol to benzylamine using a single enzyme. Conducting the same biocatalytic cascade in the presence of cofactor recycling enzymes (i.e., NADH-oxidase and formate dehydrogenase) increased the reaction yields. In summary, this work provides the first examples of enzymes showing "alcohol aminase" activity.

Biocatalysis: Enzymatic Synthesis for Industrial Applications

Biocatalysis has found numerous applications in various fields as an alternative to chemical catalysis. The use of enzymes in organic synthesis, especially to make chiral compounds for pharmaceuticals as well for the flavors and fragrance industry, are the most prominent examples. In addition, biocatalysts are used on a large scale to make specialty and even bulk chemicals. This review intends to give illustrative examples in this field with a special focus on scalable chemical production using enzymes. It also discusses the opportunities and limitations of enzymatic syntheses using distinct examples and provides an outlook on emerging enzyme classes.

Asymmetric Biocatalytic Synthesis of 1-Aryltetrahydro-β-carbolines Enabled by "Substrate Walking"

Stereoselective catalysts for the Pictet-Spengler reaction of tryptamines and aldehydes may allow a simple and fast approach to chiral 1-substituted tetrahydro-β-carbolines. Although biocatalysts have previously been employed for the Pictet-Spengler reaction, not a single one accepts benzaldehyde and its substituted derivatives. To address this challenge, a combination of substrate walking and transfer of beneficial mutations between different wild-type backbones was used to develop a strictosidine synthase from Rauvolfia serpentina (RsSTR) into a suitable enzyme for the asymmetric Pictet-Spengler condensation of tryptamine and benzaldehyde derivatives. The double variant RsSTR V176L/V208A accepted various ortho-, meta- and para-substituted benzaldehydes and produced the corresponding chiral 1-aryl-tetrahydro-β-carbolines with up to 99 % enantiomeric excess.

Intracellular Reactions Promoted by Bis(histidine) Miniproteins Stapled Using Palladium(II) Complexes

The generation of catalytically active metalloproteins inside living mammalian cells is a major research challenge at the interface between catalysis and cell biology. Herein we demonstrate that basic domains of bZIP transcription factors, mutated to include two histidine residues at i and i+4 positions, react with palladium(II) sources to generate catalytically active, stapled pallado-miniproteins. The resulting constrained peptides are efficiently internalized into living mammalian cells, where they perform palladium-promoted depropargylation reactions without cellular fixation. Control experiments confirm the requirement of the peptide scaffolding and the palladium staple for attaining the intracellular reactivity.

Heavy Enzymes and the Rational Redesign of Protein Catalysts

An unsolved mystery in biology concerns the link between enzyme catalysis and protein motions. Comparison between isotopically labelled "heavy" dihydrofolate reductases and their natural-abundance counterparts has suggested that the coupling of protein motions to the chemistry of the catalysed reaction is minimised in the case of hydride transfer. In alcohol dehydrogenases, unnatural, bulky substrates that induce additional electrostatic rearrangements of the active site enhance coupled motions. This finding could provide a new route to engineering enzymes with altered substrate specificity, because amino acid residues responsible for dynamic coupling with a given substrate present as hotspots for mutagenesis. Detailed understanding of the biophysics of enzyme catalysis based on insights gained from analysis of "heavy" enzymes might eventually allow routine engineering of enzymes to catalyse reactions of choice.

Combined Photoredox/Enzymatic C-H Benzylic Hydroxylations

Chemical transformations that install heteroatoms into C-H bonds are of significant interest because they streamline the construction of value-added small molecules. Direct C-H oxyfunctionalization, or the one step conversion of a C-H bond to a C-O bond, could be a highly enabling transformation due to the prevalence of the resulting enantioenriched alcohols in pharmaceuticals and natural products,. Here we report a single-flask photoredox/enzymatic process for direct C-H hydroxylation that proceeds with broad reactivity, chemoselectivity and enantioselectivity. This unified strategy advances general photoredox and enzymatic catalysis synergy and enables chemoenzymatic processes for powerful and selective oxidative transformations.

High-Throughput Approaches in Carbohydrate-Active Enzymology: Glycosidase and Glycosyl Transferase Inhibitors, Evolution, and Discovery

Carbohydrates are attached and removed in living systems through the action of carbohydrate-active enzymes such as glycosyl transferases and glycoside hydrolases. The molecules resulting from these enzymes have many important roles in organisms, such as cellular communication, structural support, and energy metabolism. In general, each carbohydrate transformation requires a separate catalyst, and so these enzyme families are extremely diverse. To make this diversity manageable, high-throughput approaches look at many enzymes at once. Similarly, high-throughput approaches can be a powerful way of finding inhibitors that can be used to tune the reactivity of these enzymes, either in an industrial, a laboratory, or a medicinal setting. In this review, we provide an overview of how these enzymes and inhibitors can be sought using techniques such as high-throughput natural product and combinatorial library screening, phage and mRNA display of (glyco)peptides, fluorescence-activated cell sorting, and metagenomics.

Broadening the Scope of Biocatalysis in Sustainable Organic Synthesis

This Review is aimed at synthetic organic chemists who may be familiar with organometallic catalysis but have no experience with biocatalysis, and seeks to provide an answer to the perennial question: if it is so attractive, why wasn't it extensively used in the past? The development of biocatalysis in industrial organic synthesis is traced from the middle of the last century. Advances in molecular biology in the last two decades, in particular genome sequencing, gene synthesis and directed evolution of proteins, have enabled remarkable improvements in scope and substantially reduced biocatalyst development times and cost contributions. Additionally, improvements in biocatalyst recovery and reuse have been facilitated by developments in enzyme immobilization technologies. Biocatalysis has become eminently competitive with chemocatalysis and the biocatalytic production of important pharmaceutical intermediates, such as enantiopure alcohols and amines, has become mainstream organic synthesis. The synthetic space of biocatalysis has significantly expanded and is currently being extended even further to include new-to-nature biocatalytic reactions.

Biocatalytic Strategy for Highly Diastereo- and Enantioselective Synthesis of 2,3-Dihydrobenzofuran-Based Tricyclic Scaffolds

2,3-Dihydrobenzofurans are key pharmacophores in many natural and synthetic bioactive molecules. A biocatalytic strategy is reported here for the highly diastereo- and enantioselective construction of stereochemically rich 2,3-dihydrobenzofurans in high enantiopurity (>99.9% de and ee), high yields, and on a preparative scale via benzofuran cyclopropanation with engineered myoglobins. Computational and structure-reactivity studies provide insights into the mechanism of this reaction, enabling the elaboration of a stereochemical model that can rationalize the high stereoselectivity of the biocatalyst. This information was leveraged to implement a highly stereoselective route to a drug molecule and a tricyclic scaffold featuring five stereogenic centers via a single-enzyme transformation. This work expands the biocatalytic toolbox for asymmetric C-C bond transformations and should prove useful for further development of metalloprotein catalysts for abiotic carbene transfer reactions.

Photoenzymatic Catalysis Enables Radical-Mediated Ketone Reduction in Ene-Reductases

Flavin-dependent ene-reductases (EREDs) are known to stereoselectively reduce activated alkenes, but are inactive toward carbonyls. Demonstrated here is that in the presence of photoredox catalysts, these enzymes will reduce aromatic ketones. Mechanistic experiments suggest this reaction proceeds through ketyl radical formation, a reaction pathway that is distinct from the native hydride-transfer mechanism. Furthermore, this reactivity is accessible without modification of either the enzyme or cofactors, allowing both native and non-natural mechanisms to occur simultaneously. Based on control experiments, we hypothesize that binding to the enzyme active site attenuates the reduction potential of the substrate, enabling single-electron reduction. This reactivity highlights opportunities to access new catalytic manifolds by merging photoredox catalysis with biocatalysis.

Directed Evolution of a Designer Enzyme Featuring an Unnatural Catalytic Amino Acid

The impressive rate accelerations that enzymes display in nature often result from boosting the inherent catalytic activities of side chains by their precise positioning inside a protein binding pocket. Such fine-tuning is also possible for catalytic unnatural amino acids. Specifically, the directed evolution of a recently described designer enzyme, which utilizes an aniline side chain to promote a model hydrazone formation reaction, is reported. Consecutive rounds of directed evolution identified several mutations in the promiscuous binding pocket, in which the unnatural amino acid is embedded in the starting catalyst. When combined, these mutations boost the turnover frequency (kcat ) of the designer enzyme by almost 100-fold. This results from strengthening the catalytic contribution of the unnatural amino acid, as the engineered designer enzymes outperform variants, in which the aniline side chain is replaced with a catalytically inactive tyrosine residue, by more than 200-fold.

Biocatalytic Oxidation Reactions: A Chemist's Perspective

Oxidation chemistry using enzymes is approaching maturity and practical applicability in organic synthesis. Oxidoreductases (enzymes catalysing redox reactions) enable chemists to perform highly selective and efficient transformations ranging from simple alcohol oxidations to stereoselective halogenations of non-activated C-H bonds. For many of these reactions, no "classical" chemical counterpart is known. Hence oxidoreductases open up shorter synthesis routes based on a more direct access to the target products. The generally very mild reaction conditions may also reduce the environmental impact of biocatalytic reactions compared to classical counterparts. In this Review, we critically summarise the most important recent developments in the field of biocatalytic oxidation chemistry and identify the most pressing bottlenecks as well as promising solutions.

The Hydrophobic Effect Applied to Organic Synthesis: Recent Synthetic Chemistry "in Water"

Recent developments over the past few years in aqueous micellar catalysis are discussed. Applications to problems in synthesis are highlighted, enabled by the use of surfactants that self-aggregate in water into micelles as nanoreactors. These include amphiphiles that have been available for some time, as well as those that have been newly designed. Reactions catalyzed by transition metals, including Pd, Cu, Rh, and Au, are of particular focus.

Directed Evolution of an Artificial Imine Reductase

Artificial metalloenzymes, resulting from incorporation of a metal cofactor within a host protein, have received increasing attention in the last decade. The directed evolution is presented of an artificial transfer hydrogenase (ATHase) based on the biotin-streptavidin technology using a straightforward procedure allowing screening in cell-free extracts. Two streptavidin isoforms were yielded with improved catalytic activity and selectivity for the reduction of cyclic imines. The evolved ATHases were stable under biphasic catalytic conditions. The X-ray structure analysis reveals that introducing bulky residues within the active site results in flexibility changes of the cofactor, thus increasing exposure of the metal to the protein surface and leading to a reversal of enantioselectivity. This hypothesis was confirmed by a multiscale approach based mostly on molecular dynamics and protein-ligand dockings.