History of Industrial Biotransformations – Dreams and Realities

Abstract

Throughout the history of mankind, microorganisms have been of enormous social and economic importance. Without even being aware of their existence, very early on in history man was using them in the production of food and beverages. The Sumerians and Babylonians were practising the brewing of beer before 6000 BC, references to wine making can be found in the Book of Genesis and the Egyptians used yeast for baking bread. However, knowledge of the production of chemicals such as alcohols and organic acids through fermentation is relatively recent and the first reports in the literature only appeared in the second half of the 19th century. Lactic acid was probably the first optically active compound to be produced industrially by fermentation. This was accomplished in the USA in 1880 [1]. In 1921, Chapman reviewed a number of early industrial fermentation processes for organic chemicals [2].In the course of time, it was discovered that microorganisms could modify certain compounds by simple, chemically well defined reactions, which were further catalyzed by enzymes. Nowadays, these processes are called "biotransformations". The essential difference between fermentation and biotransformation is that there are several catalytic steps between the substrate and the product in a fermentation while there are only one or two in a biotransformation. The distinction is also in the fact that the chemical structures of the substrate and the product resemble one another in a biotransformation, but not necessarily in a fermentation.

Renewable Hydrogen Carrier — Carbohydrate: Constructing the Carbon-Neutral Carbohydrate Economy

“…The enzymes used in the blood sugar testing kits have a shelf lifetime of more than one year at ambient temperature. High fructose corn syrup, low-cost sucrose replacement, is made by stabilized glucose isomerase, which can work at ~60 °C for even about two years [62]. We estimated that the enzyme costs would be very small when every enzyme in the SyPaB cocktails has total turn-over number (TTN) values of more than 10 7 -10 8 [31,33,35].…”

“…We estimated that the enzyme costs would be very small when every enzyme in the SyPaB cocktails has total turn-over number (TTN) values of more than 10 7 -10 8 [31,33,35]. Based on our experience and data in the literature, it is relatively easy to obtain thermoenzymes meeting with such basic TTN requirement, for example, Clostridium themocellum phosphoglucomutase (PGM) [63], C. themocellum phosphoglucose isomerase (PGI) [64], Thermotoga martima 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase (6PGDH) [65], T. martima fructose bisphosphatase (FBP) [66], and immobilized glucose isomerase [62]. Costly enzymes purchased from Sigma-Aldrich and other biotechnology companies (e.g., New England Biolabs) give most researchers an impression that enzymes are very costly.…”

“…The aforementioned example of glucose isomerase stability is only possible due to its immobilization permitting it to function at 60 °C for more than two years before it must be replaced [62]. Low-cost enzyme immobilization technologies are becoming widely-adopted, for example, cross-linking enzyme aggregate (CLEA) [78][79][80] and cellulose-binding module-tagged (CBM-tagged) protein immobilization [74,[81][82][83][84].…”

Potencial catalítico de lipases ligadas ao micélio de fungos filamentosos em processos de biotransformação

“…Este tipo de processo emprega enzimas purificadas ou células íntegras, em especial, células microbianas livres ou imobilizadas e apresenta notável destaque como uma tecnologia suplementar útil para a indústria química, fornecendo em alguns casos, reações que não são facilmente conduzidas pela química orgânica clássica ou, em outros casos, promovendo reações que podem substituir etapas químicas severas. [1][2] Adicionalmente, outros atributos benéficos da biotransformação incluem versatilidade reacional, especificidade, redução no número de etapas no processo e alto rendimento. 3 Diferente da fermentação, na biotransformação o biocatalisador transforma molé-culas precursoras pré-formadas (naturais ou sintéticas) em limitado número de etapas.…”

Production of biocommodities and bioelectricity by cell‐free synthetic enzymatic pathway biotransformations: Challenges and opportunities

“…Some biotransformations mediated by a single enzyme have been implemented on industrial scales. For example, fructose is produced from glucose as catalyzed by glucose isomerase (Bhosale et al, 1996;Vasic-Racki, 2006), and beta-lactam antibiotics are semi-synthesized by amidases (Demain, 2004;Vasic-Racki, 2006). Relatively complicated chemical reactions can be mediated by multi-enzymes in one pot, for example, cellulose hydrolysis by the synergetic action of endoglucanase, cellobiohydrolase, and beta-glucosidase (Zhang and Lynd, 2004), synthesis of chiral alcohols with NAD(P)H regeneration (Hummel, 1999;Wichmann and Vasic-Racki, 2005), synthesis of carbohydrates (Meyer et al, 2007;Shaeri et al, 2008), and biosynthesis of polymers (Chi et al, 2008).…”