Directed evolution based on saturation mutagenesis at sites lining the binding pocket is a commonly practiced strategy for enhancing or inverting the stereoselectivity of enzymes for use in organic chemistry or biotechnology. However, as the number of residues in a randomization site increases to five or more, the screening effort for 95 % library coverage increases astronomically until it is no longer feasible. We propose the use of a single amino acid for saturation mutagenesis at superlarge randomization sites comprising 10 or more residues. When used to reshape the binding pocket of limonene epoxide hydrolase, this strategy, which drastically reduces the search space and thus the screening effort, resulted in R,R- and S,S-selective mutants for the hydrolytic desymmetrization of cyclohexene oxide and other epoxides. X-ray crystal structures and docking studies of the mutants unveiled the source of stereoselectivity and shed light on the mechanistic intricacies of this enzyme.

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Multienzyme cascade approaches for the synthesis of optically pure molecules from simple achiral compounds are desired. Herein, a cofactor self‐sufficient cascade protocol for the asymmetric amination of racemic secondary alcohols to the corresponding chiral amines was successfully constructed by employing an alcohol dehydrogenase and a newly developed amine dehydrogenase. The compatibility and the identical cofactor dependence of the two enzymes led to an ingenious in situ cofactor recycling system in the one‐pot synthesis. The artificial redox‐neutral cascade process allowed the transformation of racemic secondary alcohols into enantiopure amines with considerable conversions (up to 94 %) and >99 % enantiomeric excess at the expense of only ammonia; this method thus represents a concise and efficient route for the asymmetric synthesis of chiral amines.

The asymmetric reductive amination of ketones with ammonia using engineered amine dehydrogenases (AmDHs) is a particularly attractive and environmentally friendly method for the synthesis of chiral amines. However, one major challenge for these engineered AmDHs is their limited range of accepted substrates. Herein, several engineered AmDHs were developed through the evolution of naturally occurring leucine dehydrogenases, which displayed good amination activity toward aliphatic ketones but restricted catalytic scope for short-chain substrates. Computational analysis helped identify two residues, located at the distal end of the substrate-binding cavity, that generate steric hindrance and prevent the binding of bulky aliphatic ketones. By fine-tuning these two key hotspots, the resulting AmDH mutants are able to accept previously inaccessible bulky substrates. More importantly, the mutations were also proved applicable for expanding the substrate scope of other homologous AmDHs with sequence identities as low as 70%, indicating a broad effect on the development of AmDHs and the synthesis of structurally diverse chiral amines.

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Optically pure epoxides are essential chiral precursors for the production of (S)-propranolol, (S)-alprenolol, and other β-adrenergic receptor blocking drugs. Although the enzymatic production of these bulky epoxides has proven difficult, here we report a method to effectively improve the activity of BmEH, an epoxide hydrolase from Bacillus megaterium ECU1001 toward α-naphthyl glycidyl ether, the precursor of (S)-propranolol, by eliminating the steric hindrance near the potential product-release site. Using X-ray crystallography, mass spectrum, and molecular dynamics calculations, we have identified an active tunnel for substrate access and product release of this enzyme. The crystal structures revealed that there is an independent product-release site in BmEH that was not included in other reported epoxide hydrolase structures. By alanine scanning, two mutants, F128A and M145A, targeted to expand the potential product-release site displayed 42 and 25 times higher activities toward α-naphthyl glycidyl ether than the wild-type enzyme, respectively. These results show great promise for structure-based rational design in improving the catalytic efficiency of industrial enzymes for bulky substrates.epoxide hydrolase | X-ray crystallography | protein engineering | product release | bulky substrate O ptically pure epoxides and the corresponding vicinal diols are valuable chiral building blocks for the production of pharmaceutically active compounds and other fine chemicals (1). Existing approaches for preparing enantiopure epoxides and diols include the asymmetric epoxidation or dihydroxylation of olefin substrates and the resolution of racemic epoxides. These reactions can be accomplished with either chemical catalysts such as chiral salen cobalt complexes and porphyrin manganese adducts or biocatalysts such as monooxygenases and epoxide hydrolases (EHs) (2-4). In the past two decades, EHs have received much attention because they are cofactor-independent enzymes that are "easy to use" for catalyzing the hydrolysis of racemic epoxides to yield highly enantiopure epoxides and vicinal diols (1, 5, 6). However, application of EHs in laboratory and industry was often hindered by their narrow substrate scope, low enantioselectivity, and regioselectivity, or product inhibition (7,8).Many protein-engineering efforts have been made to overcome these drawbacks (9, 10). For example, directed evolution by error-prone PCR or DNA shuffling has been used to enhance the activity and enantioselectivity of EHs (11-13). Structureguided mutagenesis also generated a few EH variants with improved catalytic performance (14-16). The strategy of iterative Combinatorial Active Site-Saturation Test (CAST) combines the rational approach and directed evolution to yield high-quality and small focused mutant libraries for screening EHs with better enantioselectivity (7,17). By mutating residues at the substratebinding site, the substrates of EHs have been expanded to include cyclic meso-epoxides, phenyl glycidyl ether (PGE) derivatives, and other...

Biocatalytic cascade reactions using isolated stereoselective enzymes or whole cells in one-pot processes lead to value-added chiral products in a single workup. The concept has been restricted mainly to starting materials and intermediate products that are accepted by the respective wild-type enzymes. In the present study, we exploited directed evolution as a means to create E. coli whole cells for regio- and stereoselective cascade sequences that are not possible using man-made catalysts. The approach is illustrated using P450-BM3 in combination with appropriate alcohol dehydrogenases as catalysts in either two-, three-, or four-step cascade reactions starting from cyclohexane, cyclohexanol, or cyclohexanone, respectively, leading to either (R,R)-, (S,S)-, or meso-cyclohexane-1,2-diol. The one-pot conversion of cyclohexane into (R)- or (S)-2-hydroxycyclohexanone in the absence of ADH is also described.

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