Recent advances in whole cell biocatalysis techniques bridging from investigative to industrial scale

“Recent advances in biocatalysis have strongly boosted its recognition as a valuable addition to traditional chemical synthesis routes. As for any catalytic process, catalyst's costs and stabilities are of highest relevance for the economic application in chemical manufacturing. Employing biocatalysts as whole cells circumvents the need of cell lysis and enzyme purification and hence strongly cuts on cost. At the same time, residual cell wall components can shield the entrapped enzyme from potentially harmful surroundings and aid to enable applications far from natural enzymatic environments. Further advantages are the close proximity of reactants and catalysts as well as the inherent presence of expensive cofactors. Here, we review and comment on benefits and recent advances in whole cell biocatalysis.”

Highlights:

• Resource-efficient biocatalytic manufacturing processes have already provided numerous benefits to sustainable chemistry as well as customer-centric value creation in the pharmaceutical, food, flavor, fragrance, vitamin, agrochemical, polymer, specialty, and fine chemical industries.
• Biocatalysis can make significant contributions not only to manufacturing processes, but also to the design of completely new value-creation chains. Biocatalysis can now be considered as a key enabling technology to implement sustainable chemistry.
• “Another novel reactor technology enabling high mass transfer at a minimum mechanical force has been developed by Nordic ChemQuest AB. The so-called SpinChem has been proven feasible in biocatalytic transformation using immobilized enzyme, but also for whole cell catalyst entrapped in alginate beads.”