Synthetic applications of epoxide hydrolases

Archelas, Alain; Furstoss, R.

doi:10.1016/s1367-5931(00)00179-4

Cited by 216 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…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.…”

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confidence: 99%

Engineering of an epoxide hydrolase for efficient bioresolution of bulky pharmaco substrates

Kong

Yuan

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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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...

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confidence: 99%

Engineering of an epoxide hydrolase for efficient bioresolution of bulky pharmaco substrates

Kong

Yuan

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Epoxide hydrolases (EC 3.3.2.3) catalyze the conversion of epoxides to the corresponding diols. If they are enantioselective, they can be used to produce enantiopure epoxides by means of kinetic resolution (5). In the past, when only epoxide hydrolases from mammalian sources were known (12), the use of epoxide hydrolases in biocatalysis was hampered by their poor availability and insufficient catalytic performance, such as a low turnover rate or poor enantioselectivity.…”

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Diversity and Biocatalytic Potential of Epoxide Hydrolases Identified by Genome Analysis

Loo

Kingma

Arand

et al. 2006

Appl Environ Microbiol

108

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Epoxide hydrolases play an important role in the biodegradation of organic compounds and are potentially useful in enantioselective biocatalysis. An analysis of various genomic databases revealed that about 20% of sequenced organisms contain one or more putative epoxide hydrolase genes. They were found in all domains of life, and many fungi and actinobacteria contain several putative epoxide hydrolase-encoding genes. Multiple sequence alignments of epoxide hydrolases with other known and putative ␣/␤-hydrolase fold enzymes that possess a nucleophilic aspartate revealed that these enzymes can be classified into eight phylogenetic groups that all contain putative epoxide hydrolases. To determine their catalytic activities, 10 putative bacterial epoxide hydrolase genes and 2 known bacterial epoxide hydrolase genes were cloned and overexpressed in Escherichia coli. The production of active enzyme was strongly improved by fusion to the maltose binding protein (MalE), which prevented inclusion body formation and facilitated protein purification. Eight of the 12 fusion proteins were active toward one or more of the 21 epoxides that were tested, and they converted both terminal and nonterminal epoxides. Four of the new epoxide hydrolases showed an uncommon enantiopreference for meso-epoxides and/or terminal aromatic epoxides, which made them suitable for the production of enantiopure (S,S)-diols and (R)-epoxides. The results show that the expression of epoxide hydrolase genes that are detected by analyses of genomic databases is a useful strategy for obtaining new biocatalysts.Enantiopure epoxides and vicinal diols are valuable intermediates in the synthesis of a number of pharmaceutical compounds. Epoxide hydrolases (EC 3.3.2.3) catalyze the conversion of epoxides to the corresponding diols. If they are enantioselective, they can be used to produce enantiopure epoxides by means of kinetic resolution (5). In the past, when only epoxide hydrolases from mammalian sources were known (12), the use of epoxide hydrolases in biocatalysis was hampered by their poor availability and insufficient catalytic performance, such as a low turnover rate or poor enantioselectivity. The potential for biocatalytic application of epoxide hydrolases was significantly increased with the discovery of microbial epoxide hydrolases (41), which are easier to produce in large quantities. The cloning and overexpression of several enantioselective epoxide hydrolases, e.g., from Agrobacterium radiobacter (35), Aspergillus niger (3), and potato plants (40), not only facilitated large-scale production of these enzymes but also made it possible to improve their biocatalytic properties by site-directed or random mutagenesis (34,36,43).Since many microbial genome sequences are available in the public domain, it is useful to screen these databases for genes that might encode new enzymes with interesting properties.Novel epoxide hydrolases can be identified by performing a BLAST search of the genomic databases, using amino acid sequences of known epoxide hyd...

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“…Such enantiomerically pure epoxides may be used for screening enantioselective epoxide hydrolases, although the problem of enantioselectivity is more complex. Indeed epoxide hydrolases enzymes may catalyze epoxide opening at both sides of the epoxide, leading to enantiomeric products [44] . Alternatively, the enzyme reaction may also lead to an enantioconvergent hydrolysis where a racemic epoxide is converted to a single enantiomer of the 1,2 -diol [45] .…”

Section: Epoxide Hydrolasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fluorescence Assays for Biotransformations

Reymond

2008

Modern Biocatalysis

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Synthetic applications of epoxide hydrolases

Cited by 216 publications

References 54 publications

Engineering of an epoxide hydrolase for efficient bioresolution of bulky pharmaco substrates

Engineering of an epoxide hydrolase for efficient bioresolution of bulky pharmaco substrates

Diversity and Biocatalytic Potential of Epoxide Hydrolases Identified by Genome Analysis

Fluorescence Assays for Biotransformations

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