Selective reduction of ketones using water as a hydrogen source under high hydrostatic pressure.

A selective reduction of a broad variety of ketones is described. The method is based on the combination of a Ni-Al alloy and high hydrostatic pressure (HHP, 2.8 kbar) in an aqueous medium. The reaction of the Ni-Al alloy with water provides in situ hydrogen generation and the high pressure ensures that the H(2) formed remains in the solution, thus the C=O reduction readily occurs. The application of the HHP resulted in selective formation of the desired products and the common problem of non-selective overhydrogenation could be avoided. In most cases the reductions resulted in high yields and excellent selectivities without the use of any base.

The essential tyrosine-containing loop conformation and the role of the C-terminal multi-helix region in eukaryotic phenylalanine ammonia-lyases.

Besides the post-translationally cyclizing catalytic Ala-Ser-Gly triad, Tyr110 and its equivalents are of the most conserved residues in the active site of phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL, EC 4.3.1.5), histidine ammonia-lyase (HAL, EC 4.3.1.3) and other related enzymes. The Tyr110Phe mutation results in the most pronounced inactivation of PAL indicating the importance of this residue. The recently published X-ray structures of PAL revealed that the Tyr110-loop was either missing (for Rhodospridium toruloides) or far from the active site (for Petroselinum crispum). In bacterial HAL ( approximately 500 amino acids) and plant and fungal PALs ( approximately 710 amino acids), a core PAL/HAL domain ( approximately 480 amino acids) with >or= 30% sequence identity along the different species is common. In plant and fungal PAL a approximately 100-residue long C-terminal multi-helix domain is present. The ancestor bacterial HAL is thermostable and, in all of its known X-ray structures, a Tyr83-loop-in arrangement has been found. Based on the HAL structures, a Tyr110-loop-in conformation of the P. crispum PAL structure was constructed by partial homology modeling, and the static and dynamic behavior of the loop-in/loop-out structures were compared. To study the role of the C-terminal multi-helix domain, Tyr-loop-in/loop-out model structures of two bacterial PALs (Streptomyces maritimus, 523 amino acids and Photorhabdus luminescens, 532 amino acids) lacking this C-terminal domain were also built. Molecular dynamics studies indicated that the Tyr-loop-in conformation was more rigid without the C-terminal multi-helix domain. On this basis it is hypothesized that a role of this C-terminal extension is to decrease the lifetime of eukaryotic PAL by destabilization, which might be important for the rapid responses in the regulation of phenylpropanoid biosynthesis.