Abstract ChemInform is a weekly Abstracting Service, delivering concise information at a glance that was extracted from about 200 leading journals. To access a ChemInform Abstract, please click on HTML or PDF.
Long tradition: Germany and Japan have long collaborated in the field of biocatalysis, driving industrial innovation in both countries. Biocatalysis first found its way into the chemicals industry by way of microbial processes. Further developments used isolated enzymes and tailor-made enzymes and cells for a range of processes that gave high conversion, optical purity, and space–time yield. Up to now, a broad range of industrialized biocatalytic processes have been developed in both countries (see scheme for selected products), which are summarized in this essay.
Abstract ChemInform is a weekly Abstracting Service, delivering concise information at a glance that was extracted from about 100 leading journals. To access a ChemInform Abstract of an article which was published elsewhere, please select a “Full Text” option. The original article is trackable via the “References” option.
(1980). A New Enzyme “Nitrile Hydratase” which Degrades Acetonitrile in Combination with Amidase. Agricultural and Biological Chemistry: Vol. 44, No. 9, pp. 2251-2252.
Lumichrome is a photodegradation product of riboflavin and is available as a photosensitizer and fluorescent dye. To develop new efficient methods of lumichrome production, we isolated bacterial strains with high lumichrome productivity from soil. The strain with highest productivity was identified as Microbacterium sp. strain TPU 3598. Since this strain inductively produced lumichrome when cultivated with riboflavin, we developed two different methods, a cultivation method and a resting cell method, for the production of large amounts of lumichrome using the strain. In the cultivation method, 2.4 g (9.9 mmol) of lumichrome was produced from 3.8 g (10.1 mmol) of riboflavin at the 500-ml scale (98% yield). The strain also produced 4.7 g (19.4 mmol) of lumichrome from 7.6 g (20.2 mmol) of riboflavin (96% yield) by addition of riboflavin during cultivation at the 500-ml scale. In the resting cell method, 20 g of cells (wet weight) in 100 ml of potassium phosphate buffer, pH 7.0, produced 2.4 g of lumichrome from 3.8 g of riboflavin (98% yield). Since the lumichrome production by these methods was carried out in suspension, the resulting lumichrome was easily purified from the cultivation medium or reaction mixture by centrifugation and crystallization. Thus, the biochemical methods we describe here are a significant improvement in terms of simplicity and yield over the existing chemical, photolytic, and other biochemical methods of lumichrome production.
