Novel biocatalytic reductions for synthesis of chiral amines

手性胺是合成药物分子的化学中间体，用途十分广泛。手性胺以多种形式存在，称为对映体，通常只有一种适合用于医药。然而，用标准的化学技术很难生产出许多手性胺所需的对映体。使用酶来生产胺要好得多，因为许多酶都能产生纯的对映体。然而，适合手性胺生产的酶仍然很少。在这个项目中，我们计划开发新的酶来生产用于药物制造的手性胺。这些酶来自在没有氧气的情况下生长的细菌(厌氧菌)。这些细菌有非常不寻常的酶。我们已经发现的产生胺的酶催化了其他细胞中不存在的一系列反应。该项目将包括提纯和鉴定酶。我们还将开发用于制胺的基因工程菌，因为厌氧菌并不真正适合在工业上使用。最终，新的酶将使以更低的成本制造现有药物成为可能。此外，还应该有可能生产目前无法生产的新药。

Chiral amines are used very widely as chemical intermediates to produce drug molecules. Chiral amines exist in more than one form, called enantiomers, and often only one of them is suitable for use in medicine. However, it is extremely difficult to produce the required enantiomer of many chiral amines by standard chemical techniques. It is much better to use enzymes to produce amines, because many enzymes produce pure enantiomers. However, there are still very few enzymes that are suitable for chiral amine production. In this project, we plan to develop new enzymes to produce chiral amines for drug manufacture. The enzymes are from bacteria that grow without oxygen(anaerobes). These bacteria have very unusual enzymes. The amine-producing enzymes that we have discovered catalyse a wide range of reactions that do not occur in other cells. The project will include purifying and characterising the enzymes. We shall also develop genetically engineered bacteria to use for amine manufacturing, because the anaerobes are not really suitable for use in industry. Ultimately, the new enzymes will make it possible to manufacture existing drugs much more cheaply. Furthermore, it should also become possible to produce new medicines that cannot be made at present.