Cascade and one pot reactions represent an exciting recent development in White Biotechnology. The concept of performing multi-step syntheses in a concurrent fashion has received increased attention in the past years. Especially from a Green Chemistry point of view cascades represent a very promising approach, particularly due to the avoidance of intermediate downstream and purification steps. Such unit operation steps often contribute significantly to the overall environmental impact of a process. Furthermore, workup and isolation of intermediate products binds production capacities and resources, thus thereby also significantly contributing to production costs on industrial scale. ‘Smart’ cascades allow the utilization of a side product as cosubstrate for subsequent steps and thus allow substantial cost savings. Chemo-enzymatic cascade reactions are thus expected to make a major contribution to address one of the main challenges for the European industry, the development of sustainable and efficient production processes under the ‘green chemistry’ philosophy.
BIOCASCADES brought together a team of researchers from academia and industry for an interdisciplinary and intersectoral effort to overcome these challenges. It combined techniques from different scientific fields such as biocatalysis, transition-metal catalysis, compartmentalization, enzyme discovery, enzyme engineering and reaction engineering in order to develop commercially viable and environmentally benign chemo-enzymatic one pot reactions. The combination of different well established enzymes and chemical catalysts represents an innovative way to design novel cascades.
Scientific Objectives:
• To broaden the synthetic scope by combining enzymatic transformations with transition metal organic catalysts and to define strategies to increase the sustainability of these reactions.
• To use compartmentalization techniques and enzyme engineering to improve catalyst compatibility and suppress undesired cross reactivity.
• To optimize space-time yield and atom economy, by establishing novel methods for the shift of an equilibrium, such as in situ (co)-product removal, and by protein engineering.
• To develop strategies for the scale-up of viable chemo-enzymatic cascade reactions.
Addressing these challenges, within the project 11 early stage researchers were trained on the topic of chemo-enzymatic cascade reactions based on the following Training Objectives:
• Excellent research by developing novel chemo-enzymatic cascades for the production of complex amino alcohols and amines under the supervision of research leaders from biotechnology and chemistry.
• Interdisciplinarity and international networking to obtain all skills and knowledge required for the efficient combination of different chemical and biological catalysts in cascade reactions and their application (including scale-up) at companies. Learning to interact and communicate with scientists from different fields and sectors.
• Transferable skills and entrepreneurship by developing novel and robust processes under the supervision of founders of innovative companies. Anticipation of potential challenges in the early stages of planning and the development of entrepreneurial spirit and techniques how to overcome them, which is critical to bridge the innovation gap between academia and industry.
