Microbial Metabolites for Catalytic Hydrogenation

The emerging field of biocompatible chemistry aims to combine the synthetic flexibility of chemo-catalytic reactions with the genetic programmability and sustainability benefits of microbial metabolism. This enables synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry tools to be merged, creating novel multi-step synthetic cascades to industrial small molecules by fermentation. In my talk I will present our most recent work in this area using biocompatible Pd catalysts bound to the cell membrane to intercept metabolic hydrogen gas generated from D-glucose for catalytic alkene hydrogenation. Furthermore, through ‘multiplexed biosynthesis’ I will outline how we can engineer bacteria to produce substrates and reagents for hydrogenation reactions simultaneously and hint towards the use of higher-level genetic engineering strategies to enable more complex synthetic pathways, sustainable reagents and chemistries, and membrane anchoring strategies for future applications in green chemistry. Overall, this work highlights the synthetic possibilities offered through combined chemo-catalysis and engineered microbial biosynthesis for future sustainable chemical synthesis.

Biography:

image credit: Stephen Wallace

Stephen is Professor of Chemical Biotechnology and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He has a MChem in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry from the University of Edinburgh (2008) and a DPhil in Organic Chemistry from the University of Oxford (with Martin Smith; 2012). He has held postdoctoral Fellowships at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (with Jason Chin), Harvard (with Emily Balskus), MIT (with Kris Prather), the University of Cambridge (with Steve Ley) and in 2019 was a visiting faculty member at Caltech (with Frances Arnold). In 2023 he was awarded the international Colworth Medal (Biochemical Society) and the Norman Heatley Prize (Royal Society of Chemistry). His research focusses on the study and manipulation of microbial chemistry for sustainable synthesis.