Nature Communications (Jun 2021)

Light-driven decarboxylative deuteration enabled by a divergently engineered photodecarboxylase

  • Jian Xu,
  • Jiajie Fan,
  • Yujiao Lou,
  • Weihua Xu,
  • Zhiguo Wang,
  • Danyang Li,
  • Haonan Zhou,
  • Xianfu Lin,
  • Qi Wu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24259-6
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 1
pp. 1 – 10

Abstract

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The chemical processes for the selective incorporation of deuterium into small molecules, of interest to organic and medicinal chemistry, are well established, while the enzymatic methods remain underdeveloped. Here, the authors use an enzymatic approach employing Chlorella variabilis NC64A photodecarboxylase that catalyses decarboxylative deuteration of various carboxylic acids with D2O, and identify enzyme variants that can employ substrates with different chain length acids.