Enzyme Catalyst Engineering toward the Integration of Biocatalysis and Chemocatalysis

Enzymatic catalysis, which has been driving biological processes in a green, mild, and efficient manner for billions of years, is increasingly being used in industrial processes to manufacture chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and materials for human society. Since enzymes were discovered, strategies to adapt enzymes for use as catalysts for industrial processes, such as chemical modification, immobilization, site-directed mutagenesis, directed evolution of enzymes, artificial metalloenzymes, and computational design, have been continuously pursued. In contrast to these strategies, editing enzymes to easily integrate biocatalysis with chemocatalysis is a potential way to apply enzymes in industry. Enzyme catalyst editing focuses on fine-tuning the microenvironment surrounding the enzyme or achieving a new catalytic function to construct better biocatalysis under non-natural conditions for the enzyme. Nature, the best chemist of all time, utilizes powerful macromolecular protein catalysts: enzymes. By using enzymes, nature can extract chemicals and energy from the environment and convert them into the complex molecules necessary for life.Applying enzymes in industry can considerably improve the efficiency of organic synthesis, especially the synthesis of chiral compounds.Critical improvements are to expand enzyme catalysis and improve the performance of enzymes in non-native environments.Enzyme catalyst editing is proposed to design the microenvironment surrounding enzyme molecules to elegantly integrate biocatalysis and chemocatalysis for a variety of applications.