Preparation of fatty amide polyols via epoxidation of vegetable oil amides by oat seed peroxygenase

Prior work has shown that oat (Avena sativa) seeds are a rich source of peroxygenase, an enzyme that promotes the oxidation of carbon-carbon double bonds to form epoxides. Ground and defatted oat seeds were used as a low-cost source of peroxygenase. A systematic study of the epoxidation of i-butyl amides from linseed oil was conducted. Hexane was used as the primary component of the reaction media to eliminate the need for extraction. We found that the addition of a small amount of buffered water containing Tween 20 enhanced the epoxidation activity when using t-butyl hydroperoxide and cumene hydroperoxide as oxidants. This activity could be further enhanced by the addition of isopropyl ether. Conditions for larger-scale reactions were developed and applied to amides prepared from linseed, soybean, and canola oils. Because of enzymatic selectivity, the epoxidation of adjacent double bonds was low, and monoepoxides from the amides of oleate and linoleate predominated; the diepoxide, N-i-butyl-9,10-15,16-diepoxy-12(Z)-octadecenamide, was obtained from the amide of linolenate. The enzymatically epoxidized amides from the oils were hydrolyzed in dilute acid, and the distribution of the various classes of polyols was determined. Reflecting the high proportion of starting monoepoxides, saturated diols and diols with one double bond were the major polyols obtained from soybean and canola oils. Because linseed oil contains a high proportion of linolenate, polyols obtained from the epoxides of this oil had a major amount of the tetrol, N-i-butyl-9,10,15,16-tetrahydroxy-12(Z)-octadecenamide. In contrast, the components of polyols obtained from the hydrolysis of commercial epoxide preparations of soybean and linseed methyl esters followed by amide formation were primarily saturated diols and furan derivatives resulting from the presence of adjacent epoxide groups in these preparations.