In Illinois, using energy from light to activate natural enzymes can help scientists create new-to-nature enzymatic reactions that support eco-friendly biomanufacturing — the production of fuels, plastics, and valuable chemicals from plants or other biological systems.
Applying this photoenzymatic approach, researchers have developed a clean, efficient way to synthesize crucial chemical building blocks known as chiral amines, solving a longstanding challenge in synthetic chemistry.
The study, published in Nature Catalysis, included researchers from the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), a U.S. Department of Energy-funded Bioenergy Research Center; the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Xiamen University in China.
Their work focused on hydroamination, a complex chemical reaction that can be used to produce chiral amines, which have wide applications in the synthesis of agrochemicals and other products. The team developed a photoenzymatic system that can control unstable nitrogen-centered radicals in a reaction known as enantioselective intermolecular radical hydroamination, which until now had been a major challenge in chemistry. Radicals are atoms or molecules with at least one unpaired electron, which makes them highly chemically reactive because electrons prefer to be in pairs.
