In the chiral synthesis of ingredients, finding the best bio-catalyst is often slow and costly. Paolo Braiuca, Johnson Matthey Catalysts, introduces Colour Tag Protein (CTP) technology that optimises the development and production of such enzymes.
The market requirement for chiral compounds is increasing and biotech approaches to their synthesis are emerging as one of the techniques of choice in the pharmaceutical and fine chemicals industry. The use of enzymes, such as alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH) for the synthesis of chiral alcohols, is now established and often outperforms alternative methods in terms of productivity and chiral purity. Enzyme production and engineering is, therefore, of increasing relevance to modern chemical synthesis.
Developing an enzymatic process is generally a multi-step procedure (see Figure 1). It starts with the screening of enzyme variants or microbiological strains libraries to identify the best candidate for the reaction of interest. The next steps involve the process development and development of an efficient fermentative process for enzyme production. Often during process optimisation, the characteristics of the enzyme must be fine-tuned via enzyme engineering to meet the process requirements. These steps are critical, as the economics of the final synthetic route will strongly depend on the enzyme’s catalytic performance and on its production cost. The optimisation of enzyme characteristics and of enzyme production is, therefore, of great importance.
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