Engineered enzyme speeds up sedate organic reaction

An engineered enzyme has been created to carry out a notoriously slow organic reaction, and it far outperforms all other known catalysts for this transformation.

The development applies biochemical techniques to the Morita–Baylis–Hillman (MBH) reaction, which is typically used to form a carbon–carbon bond between an alkene and an electrophile such as an aldehyde, thereby creating products typically used in further syntheses .

But although it’s extremely useful in organic synthesis, the MBH reaction is extremely slow with existing catalysts – usually small-molecule nucleophiles such as imidazole (C₃N₂H₄) – which often take days and sometimes weeks to produce a useful amount of a product. In comparison, the newly engineered enzyme – designated BH32.14 – is orders of magnitudes faster and is also enantioselective.