earticle

영어

Chirality is one of the most important symbols of nature and living organisms. For decades, chiral compounds have been widely used in pharmaceuticals, flavour, agricultural chemicals and speciality materials.
Particularly in pharmaceutical field, the need for new chiral reagents is ever increasing since the human body usually functions via chiral recognition of enzymes. For safety concerns, current regulations of USA Food and Drug Administration (FDA) demand proof that the non-therapeutic isomer should be non-teratogenic. Therefore the target for a commercial process is demanding and an enantiomeric excess (ee) of 98% is a minimum acceptable level. Biocatalysis approaches have remarkable predominance due to many advantages such as mild reaction conditions, eco‐friendliness, few by-products, high enantio-, regio- and chemoselectivity and avoidance of protection/deprotection of functional groups, thereby making it an environmentally benign alternative to conventional chemical process. As reported, the worldwide sales of single-enantiomer drugs have exceeded US $150 billions, among which the contribution rate of the biocatalysis approach is ever growing (up to 15‐20%). In addition to traditional approaches to biocatalyst screening, data mining is becoming increasingly important in the discovery of new biocatalysts due to the exponential growth of protein information in public databases in recent years. This report will discuss both the traditional and modern methods for rapid searching for industrially relavant enzymes for chiral synthesis with typical examples from our laboratory [1‐10].