Chemists from Princeton University have found a way to teach a naturally occurring enzyme how to perform a new, artificial role. The study, which was published in the journal Nature Chemistry could bring a lot of change to modern chemistry and especially have a significant on pharmaceutical production. Todd Hyster, assistant professor of chemistry at Princeton University said, “We have found a completely new way to get enzymes to do a non-natural reaction. A traditional perspective says that enzymes will only do one thing. This paper shows that this may not be true for all enzymes. More importantly, the strategy described in this paper can potentially be applied to other enzyme families, meaning we will be able to use this approach to invent completely new enzymatic reactions. I think this has the potential to alter the way we build molecules.”
Enzymes act as catalysts in a lot of chemical reactions but until now their functions have been quite limited, with specific enzymes catalyzing specific chemical reactions. Now that the team of scientists have uncovered a way for an enzyme to perform a role that is not its specific usual role, in another chemical reaction, this may open a lot of doors for chemists and pharmacists. For the study the research team added a small amount of a photoexcitable dye to the enzyme and then exposed it to green light. This helped scientists to utilize two different branches of chemistry- enzymatic catalysis (biocatalysis) and photoredox catalysis. Enzymes are usually very selective but this discovery will help scientists make selective enzymes participate in more reactions and analyse its activity.
Simon Cooper, co-author of the study said that the idea for the research came to the team from the previous researches done at Princeton in the field of visible light photocatalysis. Princeton scientists had already proved that NADPH, an important naturally occurring enzyme when exposed to UV light showed a significant change in its behavior. “When exposed to UV light, NADPH can switch from transferring two electrons and a proton in a single step to transferring first an electron and then a hydrogen atom (an electron and a proton),” continues Cooper. “We thought that if we could take advantage of this new pathway inside an enzyme, valuable new reactions awaited discovery. The most important aspect of the findings in this paper is controlling the transfer of a hydrogen atom to create only one of two possible mirror-image forms of a molecule. This type of selection between two mirror image forms has traditionally been very difficult to achieve for the transfer of a hydrogen atom, and the methods disclosed here are one solution to this challenge.” The team is excited that the discovery will have a powerful and positive impact pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals.