Industrial nitriles from biomass: Vanadium-chloroperoxidase is successfully used to transform selectively glutamic acid into 3-cyanopropanoic acid, a key intermediate for the synthesis of bio-succinonitrile and bio-acrylonitrile, by using a catalytic amount of a halide salt. This clean oxidative decarboxylation can be applied to mixtures of amino acids obtained from plant waste streams, leading to easily separable nitriles.

The current state-of-the-art of haloperoxidase catalysis in organic synthesis for halogenation reactions is presented in this review.

Chemically similar acidic amino acids present remarkable differences in reactivity under oxidative decarboxylation conditions for the production of biobased nitriles.

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