Artificial Metalloenzymes as Catalysts for Oxidative Lignin Degradation

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We report novel artificial metalloenzymes (ArMs), containing tris(pyridylmethyl)amine (TPA), for the atom economic oxidation of lignin β-O-4 model compounds, using hydrogen peroxide. The protein scaffold alters the selectivity of the reaction from a low yielding cleavage reaction when using the parent Fe-tpa complex to a high yielding benzylic alcohol oxidation when using the complex incorporated into a protein scaffold, SCP-2L A100C. Engineering the protein scaffold to incorporate glutamic acid was found to improve the ArM activity, showing that rational design of the protein environment using metal binding amino acids can be a first step toward improving the overall activity of an artificial metalloenzyme.