Ensuring the Sustainability of Biocatalysis

: Biocatalysis offers many attractive features for the synthetic chemist. In many cases, the high selectivity and ability to tailor specific enzyme features via protein engineering already make it the catalyst of choice. From the perspective of sustainability, several features such as catalysis under mild conditions and use of a renewable and biodegradable catalyst also look attractive. Nevertheless, to be sustainable at a larger scale it will be essential to develop processes operating at far higher concentrations of product, and which make better use of the enzyme via improved stability. In this Concept, it is argued that a particular emphasis on these specific metrics is of particular importance for the future implementation of biocatalysis in industry, at a level that fulfills its true potential. How sustainable is it really? Enzyme‐based biocatalysis offers selective catalysis under mild conditions with a renewable, biodegradable, and tunable catalyst. A close dialogue between protein engineers and process engineers will be essential to ensure the sustainability of scalable biocatalytic processes, operating at high product concentrations (to reduce E‐factor) and high enzyme stability (to reduce costs).