Optimising Terpene Synthesis with Flow Biocatalysis

Optimising Terpene Synthesis with Flow Biocatalysis

Sesquiterpenes are an important family of natural products, many of which exhibit important pharmaceutical and agricultural properties. They are biosynthesised from farnesyl diphosphate in sesquiterpene synthase catalysed reactions. Here, we report the development of a highly efficient segmented flow system for the enzyme-catalysed continuous flow production of sesquiterpenes. Design of experim...

Biocatalysis and enzymes in organic synthesis.

Efficient synthesis of simvastatin by use of whole-cell biocatalysis.

Simvastatin is a semisynthetic derivative of the fungal polyketide lovastatin and is an important drug for lowering cholesterol levels in adults. We have developed a one-step, whole-cell biocatalytic process for the synthesis of simvastatin from monacolin J. By using an Escherichia coli strain overexpressing the previously discovered acyltransferase LovD (X. Xie, K. Watanabe, W. A. Wojcicki, C....

Rapid protein immobilization for thin film continuous flow biocatalysis.

A versatile enzyme immobilization strategy for thin film continuous flow processing is reported. Here, non-covalent and glutaraldehyde bioconjugation are used to immobilize enzymes on the surfaces of borosilicate reactors. This approach requires only ng of protein per reactor tube, with the stock protein solution readily recycled to sequentially coat >10 reactors. Confining reagents to thin fil...

Performance optimising hardware synthesis of shared objects

Acknowledgements Most of the ideas presented in this thesis have been developed while I was working for the EU project ODETTE (no. IST-1999-11476; funded by the European Commission under the 5th framework programm). First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nebel, who encouraged my work, and who was certainly more convinced than I that this dissertation will be succe...