Nitrile hydratases and amidases from Rhodococcus erythropolis strains

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek has a paper (Expression control of nitrile hydratase and amidase genes in Rhodococcus erythropolis and substrate specificities of the enzymes) from Nesvera and co-workers at the Institute of Microbiology in Prague which looks at the expression of the aldoxime dehydratase/nitrile hydratase/amidase pathway in two different strains of NHase from Rhodococcus erythropolis- A4 and CCM2595. It also looks at some of the selectivity of the constituent enzymes in this pathway towards cyanohydrins. They make some comparisons to the AJ270 strain which we  published on in 2011. Rather like us, they find that Rhodococcus erythropolis strains are not very enantioselective NHases for mandelonitrile derivatives- our paper reports E=2 for unadorned mandelonitrile.

 

PVA-chitosan based immobilization of NHase for dynamic kinetic resolution of rac-mandelonitrile

A recently published paper by Pawar and Yadav in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research entitled “Enantioselective Enzymatic Hydrolysis ofrac-Mandelonitrile to R-Mandelamide by Nitrile Hydratase Immobilized onPoly(vinyl alcohol)/Chitosan–Glutaraldehyde Support” describes the improvement in performance the nitrile hydratase from Rhodococcus rhodocrous ATCC BAA-870 exhibits when immobilized on PVA/chitosan. The reaction being tested is the DKR of rac-mandelonitrile.

New patent on NHase from Mitsubishi Rayon

Mitsubishi Rayon have published a new US patent (20140120588) protecting a specific set of primary sequences of NHase.

Enhancement of NHase stability with self assembling peptides

There is an in-press paper available online entitled “Enhancement ofthermo-stability and product tolerance of Pseudomonasputida nitrile hydratase by fusing with self-assembling peptide” in the Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering by Zhemin Zhou and co-workers. They describe how they have used some self-assembling peptide based tags appended to the beta subunit to enhance thermal stability and substrate tolerance.