Development of amine dehydrogenases toward production of chiral amines

One in four of the top 200 selling pharmaceutical drugs contain a chiral amine. Chiral amines often require difficult synthesis through traditional heterogeneous catalysts. As a result, the use of biocatalysts in industrial applications to create amines has been increasingly desired and developed. Amine dehydrogenases (AmDHs) are a novel class of enzymes that catalyze the reaction of prochiral ketones to chiral amines. Through protein engineering on existing amino acid dehydrogenase scaffolds, ketones instead of carboxylic acids are now substrates of the AmDH. This work will describe the use of biocatalysts, specifically the AmDHs, as a green alternative to catalyze ketones to enantiomerically pure amines.Ph.D