“…One particularly interesting property of albumin is its catalytic abilities toward various organic molecules. Studies have shown that albumin can catalyze the following reactions: hydrolysis of esters (esterase-like activities: Tildon and Ogilvie, 1972;Means and Bender, 1975;Kurono et al, 1992), hydrolysis of amides (protease-like activities: Ohta et al, 1983), chiral inversion of thalidomide (Reist et al, 1998), cyanide detoxification (Jarabak and Westley, 1986), decomposition of a Meisenheimer complex (Taylor and Vatz, 1973;Taylor et al, 1975), proton transfer reaction (Kikuchi et al, 1996;Hollfelder et al, 1996), -elimination (Klein and Reymond, 1998), methylation of naphthol (Cavazza and Zandomeneghi, 1993), sorbic acid-thiol reaction (Wedzicha and Zeb, 1991), stereoselective reactions such as asymmetric Weitz-Scheffer epoxidation (Colonna et al, 1987), asymmetric periodate oxidation of sulfides (Colonna et al, 1986), and Diels-Alder reactions (Colonna et al, 1988). All of the above reactions were studied under aqueous solutions.…”