Practical two-step synthesis of enantiopure styrene oxide through an optimized chemoenzymatic approach

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• 作者：Kai Wu ; Hualei Wang ; Lifeng Chen ; Haiyang Fan…
• 关键词：Styrene oxide ; Alcohol dehydrogenase ; Enantioselectivity ; Directed evolution
• 刊名：Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：October 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：100
• 期：20
• 页码：8757-8767
• 全文大小：1,038 KB
• 刊物类别：Chemistry and Materials Science
• 刊物主题：Chemistry
  Biotechnology
  Microbiology
  Microbial Genetics and Genomics
  
• 出版者：Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
• ISSN：1432-0614
• 卷排序：100

文摘

Enantiopure styrene oxide (SO) and its derivatives are important building blocks for chiral synthesis. In this study, we developed an attractive “1-pot, 2-step” chemoenzymatic approach for producing enantiopure SO with 100 % theoretical yield. This approach involved asymmetric reduction of α-chloroacetophenone by an alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH; step 1), followed by base-induced ring closure (epoxidation) of enantiopure 2-chloro-1-phenylethanol produced by the ADH (step 2). By-product formation during epoxidation was suppressed to <1 % by adding methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) as the second phase. Therefore, with this optimized approach, ADH from Lactobacillus kefir (LkDH) successfully produced 1 M (S)-SO, with 99 % analytical yield and 97.8 % enantiomeric excess (ee). In the preparation of (R)-SO, a semi-rational strategy of active pocket iterative saturation mutagenesis (ISM) was successfully used to inverse the enantioselectivity of LkDH (muDH2, F147L/Y190P/A202F/M206H/V196L/S96D/K97V), which produced the opposite enantiomer (R)-2-chloro-1-phenylethanol. Through the optimized chemoenzymatic approach, muDH2 was successfully used to prepare 1 M (R)-SO, with 98.1 % ee and 99.0 % analytical yield. Our results indicated that this optimized chemoenzymatic approach could be used to produce both enantiomers of SO at concentrations as high as 120 g/L within 14 h, which is the highest concentration as far as we know. MuDH2 obtained through ISM also showed reversed enantioselectivity toward another 13 aromatic ketones, compared with wild-type (WT) LkDH. Furthermore, a molecular docking experiment demonstrated that muDH2 inverted the binding orientation of the substrate, which may be the reason for its inverse enantioselectivity.