CBI Colloquium with Prof. Kourist (TU Granz)

Title: Multi-enzyme cascade reactions for a renewable biotechnology – from biobased polymers to photobiocatalysis

Cascade and one pot reactions represent an exciting and recent development in biocatalysis. There are, however, a range of technological and scientific challenges to be met en route to industrial scale. In this talk, I will focus on the coupling of biocatalysts to other catalysts in order to provide routes that would be difficult with the individual, separated reactions.
A first example presents the synthesis of biobased olefins as highly promising polymer precursors. The alpha-methylene lactone Tulipalin A has two polymerizable functional moieties and is a potential substitute of (meth)acrylates in vinyl-addition polymerization and (co)monomer for lactone ring-opening polymerization. While Tulipalin A can be isolated from, its biosynthesis remains unknown. A possible synthesis route starts from the microbial terpenoid metabolism. The key step of this pathway is catalyzed by a membrane-bound monooxygenase. Rational design of the activity of this this membrane-enzyme aiming based on de novo structure predictions will be presented.
A second example deals with the coupling of enzymes with photosynthetic water-splitting as means to provide electrons and oxygen for redox biotransformation. This approach greatly improves the atom economy of redox biotransformations and circumvents problems associated to the low mass-transfer of oxygen. Several examples demonstrated the feasibility of the approach with high selectivity and high reaction rates for several redox processes. The presentation will discuss strategies how to overcome current limitations and to improve the volumetric productivity by combining process design and metabolic engineering, and present a strategy towards clean redox biocatalysis in engineered autotrophic microorganisms.

CV Prof. Dr. Robert Kourist

Dr. Robert Kourist is full Professor of Molecular Biotechnology and head of the institute with the same name at Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria and Leader of the Area Biotransformation at the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology. He received his diploma in biochemistry from the University of Greifswald, Germany, in 2006. After obtaining his PhD in 2008 under the supervision of Prof. Uwe Bornscheuer at the University of Greifswald, he went for one year as postdoctoral fellow to the laboratory of Prof. Kenji Miyamoto at the Keio University in Yokohama, Japan. In 2009, he received the DSM Science and Technology Award North and a 1st prize in the VentureCup Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In 2015, he was appointed member of the Young College of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Northrhine Westphalia. From 2012 to 2016, he was Junior Professor for Microbial Biotechnology at the Ruhr-University Bochum.

Dr. Kourist’s expertise lies in the field of biocatalysis with a special focus on the development of chemo-enzymatic cascade reactions and light-catalyzed redox reactions. He has co-authored more than 120 publications and patents and has an H-index of 37.