Biocatalytic ketone reduction: A green and efficient access to enantiopure alcohols

Chiral secondary alcohols play an important role in pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and chemical industries. In recent years, impressive steps forward have been achieved towards biocatalytic ketone reduction as a green and useful access to enantiopure alcohols. An increasing number of novel and robust enzymes are now accessible as a result of the ongoing progress in genomics, screening and evolution technologies, while process engineering provides further success in areas of biocatalytic reduction in meeting synthetic challenges. The versatile platform of these techniques and strategies offers the possibility to apply high substrate loading and thus to overcome the limitation of low volumetric productivity of usual enzymatic processes which is the bottleneck for their practical application. In addition, the integration of bioreduction with other enzymatic or chemical steps allows the efficient synthesis of more complex chiral products. (c) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.