Department of Chemistry, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Hans-Meerwein Strasse, 35032 Marburg, Germany.
J Am Chem Soc. 2013 Aug 28;135(34):12480-96. doi: 10.1021/ja405051f. Epub 2013 Aug 20.
Enzymes as catalysts in synthetic organic chemistry gained importance in the latter half of the 20th century, but nevertheless suffered from two major limitations. First, many enzymes were not accessible in large enough quantities for practical applications. The advent of recombinant DNA technology changed this dramatically in the late 1970s. Second, many enzymes showed a narrow substrate scope, often poor stereo- and/or regioselectivity and/or insufficient stability under operating conditions. With the development of directed evolution beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present day, all of these problems can be addressed and generally solved. The present Perspective focuses on these and other developments which have popularized enzymes as part of the toolkit of synthetic organic chemists and biotechnologists. Included is a discussion of the scope and limitation of cascade reactions using enzyme mixtures in vitro and of metabolic engineering of pathways in cells as factories for the production of simple compounds such as biofuels and complex natural products. Future trends and problems are also highlighted, as is the discussion concerning biocatalysis versus nonbiological catalysis in synthetic organic chemistry. This Perspective does not constitute a comprehensive review, and therefore the author apologizes to those researchers whose work is not specifically treated here.
酶作为合成有机化学中的催化剂，在 20 世纪后半叶变得越来越重要，但它们仍然存在两个主要的局限性。首先，许多酶的数量不够大，无法满足实际应用的需要。重组 DNA 技术在 20 世纪 70 年代末的出现彻底改变了这一局面。其次，许多酶表现出狭窄的底物范围，往往立体选择性和/或区域选择性差，在操作条件下稳定性不足。自 20 世纪 90 年代定向进化的发展以来，所有这些问题都可以得到解决。本文重点介绍了这些问题和其他一些发展，这些发展使酶成为合成有机化学家及生物技术专家工具包的一部分。文中还讨论了在体外使用酶混合物进行级联反应的范围和局限性，以及细胞途径的代谢工程，细胞作为生产生物燃料和复杂天然产物等简单化合物的工厂。文中还强调了未来的趋势和问题，并讨论了在合成有机化学中生物催化与非生物催化的比较。本文并不是一篇全面的综述，因此作者对未在此处特别讨论的研究人员表示歉意。
