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Photoinduced chemomimetic biocatalysis for enantioselective intermolecular radical conjugate addition

Nature Catalysis volume 5, pages 586–593 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Exploiting nature’s catalysts for non-natural transformations that are inaccessible to chemocatalysis is highly desirable but challenging. On the one hand, the widespread nicotinamide-dependent oxidoreductases have not been utilized for single-electron-transfer-induced bimolecular cross-couplings; on the other, the addition of catalytic asymmetric radical conjugate to terminal alkenes remains a challenge owing to strong racemic background reaction and unselective termination of prochiral radical species. Here we report a chemomimetic biocatalysitic approach for construction of alpha-carbonyl stereocentres via an unnatural intermolecular conjugate addition of N-(acyloxy)phthalimides-derived radicals with acceptor-substituted terminal alkenes, by combination of visible-light excitation and nicotinamide-dependent ketoreductases (KREDs). Based on protein crystal structure, we engineered KREDs via a semi-rational mutagenesis strategy to improve reaction outcomes with a small and high-quality variants library. Mechanistic investigations combining wet experiments, crystallographic studies and computational simulations demonstrate that the repurposed biocatalyst can suppress racemic background reaction and unselected side reactions, yielding enantioselectivity that is challenging to achieve by chemocatalysis.

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Fig. 1: Repurposing NADPH-dependent KREDs for an abiotic radical reaction.
Fig. 2: Reaction development.
Fig. 3: Substrate scope of NADPH-dependent KREDs enables abiotic photocatalysis.
Fig. 4: Mechanistic studies.

Data availability

Data relating to the materials and methods, experimental procedures, mechanistic studies and computational calculations, HPLC spectra and NMR spectra are available in the Supplementary Information. The atomic coordinates of the optimized computational models are available in the Supplementary Data. The configurations of molecular dynamics simulations have been deposited in GitHub (https://github.com/fpikachu96/KRED-data). The atomic coordinates of apo-P2-D12, apo-K3, P2-D12-2a, K3-2a and K3-NHPI have been deposited in the Protein Data Bank (http://www.rcsb.org) under accession code 7VDO, 7VE7, 7EJJ, 7EJI and 7EJH, respectively. All other data are available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the US Department of Energy (no. DE-SC0018420 to H.Z.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 2073077 to B.W.) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (no. 2019YFA09005000 to J.Z.). NMR data were collected at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology Core, on a 600-MHz NMR funded by NIH grant no. S10-RR028833 (to H.Z.). We thank Codexis, Inc. for kindly sharing the amino acid sequence information of KRED-P2-D12, the staff of beamlines BL17U1 and BL19U1 of the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the National Center for Protein Science Shanghai for access and help with X-ray data collection.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Xiaoqiang Huang, Jianqiang Feng, Jiawen Cui, Guangde Jiang.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Xiaoqiang Huang, Guangde Jiang, Wesley Harrison & Huimin Zhao

  2. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Xiaoqiang Huang, Guangde Jiang, Wesley Harrison & Huimin Zhao

  3. Chemistry and Biomedicine Innovation Center, State Key Laboratory of Coordination Chemistry, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Xiaoqiang Huang

  4. State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces and Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China

    Jianqiang Feng & Binju Wang

  5. State Key Laboratory of Bio-organic and Natural Products Chemistry, Center for Excellence in Molecular Synthesis, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

    Jiawen Cui, Xin Zang & Jiahai Zhou

  6. CAS Key Laboratory of Quantitative Engineering Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China

    Jiahai Zhou

  7. Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Huimin Zhao

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Contributions

H.Z. coordinated the project. X.H. and H.Z. conceived the project and designed experiments. X.H. performed the majority of the experiments. J.F. and B.W. performed computational studies. J.C., X.Z. and J.Z. performed all structural biology studies. G.J. built the mutation library. W.H. contributed to scope investigation. X.H., B.W. and H.Z. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Binju Wang or Huimin Zhao.

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Nature Catalysis thanks Chun-Jung Chen, Peng Tao and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–47, Tables 1–16, discussions, HPLC spectra and NMR spectra.

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Supplementary Data 1

Atomic coordinates of the optimized computational models.

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Huang, X., Feng, J., Cui, J. et al. Photoinduced chemomimetic biocatalysis for enantioselective intermolecular radical conjugate addition. Nat Catal 5, 586–593 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-022-00777-4

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