Protein engineering of penicillin acylase for improved antibiotic synthesis

The introduction of economically feasible green synthetic routes is an important current trend in the fine chemicals industry. Developing biocatalytic alternatives for already existing classic chemical synthesis can lead to greatly reduced waste production as well as lower energy consumption. Even though biocatalysis holds great promise in green chemistry, the number of full-scale applications is still modest (Straathof et al. 2002). this is probably caused by several restrictions of enzymes for industrial application, such as limited substrate range, lack of enzymes catalyzing specific reactions, insufficient enzyme stability under industrial conditions, low space time yields and a sometimes the need for cofactors in enzymatic reactions (Bommarius and Bommarius-Riebel 2007). Blaser and Smith (2004) compared biocatalytic and traditional chemocatalytic routes for manufacture of a key chiral intermediate and concluded that the biocatalytic approaches lack the space time yields, preocess mass intensity and catalytic efficiency.