Towards Chemo-Enzymatic Reactions under Continuous Flow Conditions

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SELECTBIO

Over the centuries mankind has always profited from biocatalytic processes in the production of wine, beer, and bread for example. Despite the technological knowledge available for thousands of years in these fermentation processes, interestingly only in the last 200 years scientists have developed the concepts and tools that allow chemists and biochemists to use the natural power of biocatalysts in a non natural way in the laboratory. Despite all these achievements, some drawbacks still persists in the context of its use in the organic chemistry laboratory. In the case where isolated enzymes are used, these drawbacks are related to the stability, purity of the enzyme, availability and the necessity of co-factors. For industrial purposes the use of free lipases in batch reactors can be in some cases the most advantageous way of working due to the high cost of the immobilized enzyme and consequent need of recyclability for the biocatalyst. In this work we have optimized several chemo-enzymatic continuous flow processes with packed bed reactors in order to obtain chiral amines of industrial importance. In all cases cited above, a better productivity was obtained when using the packed bed reactor when compared to the batch reactors.