Discovery of a novel (R)-selective bacterial hydroxynitrile lyase from Acidobacterium capsulatum.

Hydroxynitrile lyases (HNLs) are powerful carbon-carbon bond forming enzymes. The reverse of their natural reaction - the stereoselective addition of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) to carbonyls - yields chiral cyanohydrins, versatile building blocks for the pharmaceutical and chemical industry. Recently, bacterial HNLs have been discovered, which represent a completely new type: HNLs with a cupin fold. Due to various benefits of cupins (e.g. high yield recombinant expression in Escherichia coli), the class of cupin HNLs provides a new source for interesting, powerful hydroxynitrile lyases in the ongoing search for HNLs with improved activity, enantioselectivity, stability and substrate scope. In this study, database mining revealed a novel cupin HNL from Acidobacterium capsulatum ATCC 51196 (AcHNL), which was able to catalyse the (R)-selective synthesis of mandelonitrile with significantly better conversion (97%) and enantioselectivity (96.7%) than other cupin HNLs.

Characterization of two bacterial hydroxynitrile lyases with high similarity to cupin superfamily proteins.

Hydroxynitrile lyases (HNLs) catalyze the cleavage of cyanohydrins. In the reverse reaction, they catalyze the formation of carbon-carbon bonds by enantioselective condensation of hydrocyanic acid with carbonyls. In this study, we describe two proteins from endophytic bacteria that display activity in the cleavage and the synthesis reaction of (R)-mandelonitrile with up to 74% conversion of benzaldehyde (enantiopreference ee 89%). Both showed high similarity to proteins of the cupin superfamily which so far were not known to exhibit HNL activity.

Improvement of a stereoselective biocatalytic synthesis by substrate and enzyme engineering: 2-hydroxy-(4'-oxocyclohexyl)acetonitrile as the model.

Even if biocatalysis is finding increasing application, it still has to gain widespread use in synthetic chemistry. Reasons for this are limitations that enzymes have with regard to substrate range, reaction scope, and insufficient selectivity with unnatural compounds. These shortcomings can be challenged by enzyme and/or substrate engineering, which are employed to alter substrate specificity and enhance the enzyme selectivity toward unnatural substrates. Herein, these two approaches are coupled to improve the hydroxynitrile lyase catalyzed synthesis of 2-hydroxy-(4'-oxocyclohexyl)acetonitrile (4). The ketone functionality is masked as an enol ether, and the oxynitrilase of Hevea brasiliensis is engineered towards this masked substrate to give the product with a high optical purity and to drastically lower the amount of enzyme needed.