Biocatalytic Applications

Abstract

Of all the types of enzyme-catalyzed reactions, hydrolytic transformations involving amide and ester bonds are the easiest to perform using proteases, esterases, or lipases. The key features that have made hydrolases the favorite class of enzymes for organic chemists during the past two decades are their lack of sensitive cofactors (which otherwise would need to be recycled) and the large number of readily available enzymes possessing relaxed substrate specificities to choose from. About half of the total research in the field of biotransformations has been performed using hydrolytic enzymes of this type [1, 2]. The reversal of the reaction, giving rise to ester or amide synthesis, has been particularly well investigated using enzymes in organic solvent systems. The special methodologies involved in this latter type of reaction are described in Sect. 3.1.