Green Chemistry Biocatalysis

Green chemistry involves making useful compounds without harsh chemicals or environmental pollutants. The urgent need to protect the environment gives added impetus to this area. Green synthesis has several advantages: including, low environmental impact, low cost and low energy input. A key technology at the heart of Green Chemistry is the use of enzymes for Biocatalysis.

The use of enzymes in green synthesis is attractive as enzymes are naturally occurring, biodegradable and highly specific catalysts. A drawback with the use of enzymes has been their solvent tolerance and thermostability. However, a wide variety of strategies are being used to circumvent the stability issue including protein engineering, covalent modification, immobilisation and use of extremophile enzymes. A recent development has also been the use of “solvent engineering” (e.g. use of Ionic liquids / Deep Eutectic solvents (DES)) rather than traditional organic solvents. Additionally, progress in cofactor regeneration systems, cascade reactions, and computational approaches for enzyme design holds great promise.

With an over-arching aim of limiting future climate change - there is an ongoing need for the development of enzymes and biocatalytic processes for green and sustainable synthesis. The aim of the current Research Topic is to cover novel approaches to advance green, sustainable processes for the generation of new materials using Biocatalysis in ways that are environmentally protective and require low energy input.

This Research Topic welcomes submissions from areas that include, but are not limited to:

• Enzymatic synthesis of value-added chemicals

• Enzyme discovery, design, and engineering

• Optimization of biocatalytic processes through solvent engineering for green chemistry biocatalysis

• Strategies to enhance enzyme stability for green chemistry biocatalysis

• Enzymatic/chemo-enzymatic cascade reactions and cofactor regeneration systems

• Use of computational tools and machine learning approaches for optimization of biocatalytic processes

Keywords: enzyme engineering, green chemistry, biocatalysis

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.