Aligning cobalt centre NHases

I have been using the FATCAT protocol to look at structural alignments of differing cobalt centred NHases. This is available as a tool here.
Here is a picture of the alpha chains of 1V29 and 1 IRE aligned.

And here is a picture of the alignment of the beta chains. A bit more variation there.

A new review: Industrial Biotechnology- the future of green chemistry

The most recent issue of Green Chemistry has a 41 page review (DOI: 10.1039/C1GC15579B) by Udo Kragl and his co-workers Stefanie Wenda, Sabine Illner and Annett Mell, entitled  "Industrial Biotechnology- the future for green chemistry" which is a useful overview of where biocatalysis is now. A nice feature it has that I havent seen before is the use of little boxes which are labelled "critical remarks" to discuss highlight problems sometimes in the perception and sometimes in the reality of using biocatalytic process industrially.
As is necessary in this sort of review, there is a discussion (p. 3011) on how good nitrile hydratase is for bulk synthesis of acrylamide though it is interesting to see the scale of the use is "more than 50,000 tons per year" referring back to a viewpoint paper in ChemCatChem authored by Yuryev and Liese which actually says the Mitsubishi Rayon process "runs on scales up to 50,000 tons per year"- whatever that actually means! So it would appear that my suspicion that no one actually knows how successful (in terms of level of adoption) one of the most successfully implemented biocatalytic processes is, has not been contradicted!
Directly following the discussion of acrylamide manufacture is a discussion comparing the chemical and the Lonza chemoenzymatic routes to nicotinamide, with some excellent leading references.