Turn hazard waste into valuable treasure by a "chemomimetic" biocatalytic system
In the daily life, everyone would be troubled by various wastes. These wastes may cause the serous environmental pollution. The utilization of waste has become the hot spot of scientific research.
The Enzyme Engineering Group, directed by Professor LI Shengying at Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), together with the research team led by Professor LIU Shuangjiang at Institute of Microbiology, CAS, announced that they found a novel cresol biodegradation pathway in bacterium. This pathway could serve not only in biological degradation of environmentally hazardous compounds, but also in bioactive ingredients of Chinese medicine plants.
Researchers solved the X-ray crystal structure of the central oxidation enzyme. With understanding of the structural basis of this unique enzyme, a biocatalytic system that was able to selectively oxidize a suite of alkylphenols, was successfully developed.
The biocatalytic processes involved various types of oxidative reactions including hydroxylation, dehydrogenation, and carbon-carbon bond cleavage. In particular, absolute stereoselectivity was achieved during the hydroxylation on 4-ethylphenol and 3-ethylphenol. This was extremely difficult to achieve in chemical catalysis.
Furthermore, this chemomimetic biocatalytic system was found to be able to selectively oxidize not only alkylphenols, but also other different alcohols. This showed its great potential in practical application.
This work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Figure: cresol biodegradation pathway and chemominetic biocatalytic sysytem
（TEXT and Image By DU Lei）
Contact：
Prof. LI Shengying, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology，Chinese Academy of Sciences
(http://english.qibebt.cas.cn/)
Qingdao, Shandong, 266101, China
Tel: +86-0532-80662676
E-mail: lishengying@qibebt.ac.cn
References:
1. Lei Du, Li Ma, Feifei Qi, Xianliang Zheng, Chengying Jiang, Ailei Li, Xiaobo Wan, Shuang-Jiang Liu, and Shengying Li, Characterization of a unique pathway for 4-cresol catabolism initiated by phosphorylation in Corynebacterium glutamicum. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2016. 291(12): p. 6583-6594.
http://www.jbc.org/content/291/12/6583.long
2. Lei Du, Sheng Dong, Xingwang Zhang, Chengying Jiang, Jingfei Chen, Lishan Yao, Xiao Wang, Xiaobo Wan, Xi Liu, Xinquan Wang, Shaohua Huang, Qiu Cui, Yingang Feng, Shuang-Jiang Liu, and Shengying Li, Selective oxidation of aliphatic C-H bonds in alkylphenols by a chemomimetic biocatalytic system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114, E5129-e5137, doi:10.1073/pnas.1702317114.
http://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/E5129.long
