Several approaches to asymmetric biotransformation aiming to obtain high optical purity products are available. One can select the optimal bioreagent among several tested to perform the desired biotransformation with a high ee or to modulate the conditions of a reaction catalyzed by a microorganism yielding a moderate ee so as to improve the optical purity of the product. Optimization of the bioprocess parameters is one of the strategies affecting the enantioselectivity of biotransformation alongside site-directed-mutagenesis. Conversions and stereoselectivity can be improved by using enzyme inhibitors (high concentration of substrate, additives), thermal deactivation (temperature effect on selectivity) and organic cosolvents.
2.1. Enantioselective Bioreduction Reaction of Benzil to the Corresponding (S)-Benzoin
We first carried out the reduction of benzil (
1) catalyzed by an antifungal agent containing live
A. pullulans cells in a phosphate buffer solution at different pH values (pH 5.0 to 8.0). We used glucose as the source of carbon. The reaction was started by adding compound
1, previously dissolved in ethanol at various concentrations as described in the Experimental section. The mixture was incubated at 30 °C for 24 h. The results are summarized in
Table 1.
The effectiveness of bioconversion was strongly affected by both the concentration of substrate and pH of the reaction medium. The highest (up to 92%) ee of (S)-benzoin was obtained for 1 × 10−5 mol of 1 in a solution at pH 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 7.2 and 7.5. At a lower pH (5.0–6.0), a gradual decrease in the optical efficiency of the (S)-enantiomer was observed with increasing substrate concentration. The phosphate buffer system at pH 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 showed a slight advantage of the opposite enantiomer with 8–28% ee for (R)-benzoin. These results suggest that the activities of different dehydrogenases contained in strains DSM 14940 and DSM 14941 of A. pullulans strongly depend on two parameters: pH of the solution and the concentration of the starting reagent. Putatively, in a neutral or slightly alkaline solution (pH 7.2 and 7.5), (S)-stereopreference dehydrogenases selectively reduce the symmetrical diaryl diketone, yielding a significant proportion of the (S)-isomer irrespective of the substrate concentration. In most cases, the degree of benzil conversion after 24 h of reaction was high (up to 95.5%).
The addition of other sources of carbon, fructose and sucrose, at the pre-incubation stage was also examined. The reaction was carried out at 30 °C. Optimal results were obtained with glucose. It seems that the presence of fructose as a carbon source increases the follow-up reaction, reducing benzoin to the corresponding diol. As a consequence, in most cases, it reduces the enantiomeric purity of hydroxy ketone and its contribution to the post-reaction mixture (
Table 2).
Temperature often has a significant impact on bioprocess selectivity, especially in the presence of isolated enzymes, for example hydrolases, or in simple oxidation–reduction models [
40,
41,
42]. Decreasing the temperature usually results in an improvement in enantioselectivity, but may have an adverse effect on the degree of substrate conversion [
43,
44]. M.C. Fragnelli et al. observed a completely different relationship: reduction of benzil to the corresponding hydroxy ketone, along with a decrease in temperature, was characterized by a slight decrease in the enantiomeric purity of the product with a simultaneous increase in process efficiency. The reduced temperature provides cells with decreased reducing activity towards diol [
33].
The bioreduction of
1 was carried out at two additional temperatures (
Table 3). Based on previous experiments, glucose was selected as an energy source. It seems that the temperature of 30 °C is optimal, as along with a decrease in temperature to 28 °C, a slight decrease in chemical and optical efficiency and a greater percentage of diol in the post-reaction mixture were observed. A similar observation was made at a higher temperature, and a particular decrease in enantioselectivity was noticed at lower pH (5.5, 6.0).
Attempts have been made to improve the enantioselectivity of biotransformation with the so-called additives. Compounds used as additives can act as hydrogen donors for cofactor regeneration (alcohols), act as inhibitors of enzymes with a particular stereopreference or increase the availability of the substrate for the enzyme (surfactants), and perform chemical modification of the enzyme, increasing its activity (sulfur compounds) [
7,
45,
46,
47]. The following potential inhibitors were used in the benzil biotransformation reaction: allyl alcohol, ethyl chloroacetate, cysteine, (9-antryl)glyoxylate (AMA-1), 3-methylbutan-2-one, 4-methylpentan-2-one. The results are shown in
Table 4.
Surprisingly, all additives used—to a greater or lesser extent—inhibited the effect of dehydrogenases with (S)-stereopreference. The magnitude of these changes depended on the pH of the reaction medium. In the solution at pH 5.0–6.5 in the presence of additives, we observed enrichment of the mixture with the (R)-isomer. The highest excess of this isomer, regardless of the pH of the solution, was observed in the biotransformation reaction with the addition of ethyl chloroacetate. In a system with a phosphate buffer at pH 5.5, the optical purity (ee) of the product was 56%. Interestingly, in this solution, the bioreduction reaction proceeded with approximately 50% ee in the presence of each additive, indicating the phosphate buffer solution at pH 5.5 as optimal for the conversion of benzil to (R)-benzoin.
Another parameter examined in the benzil bioreduction reaction was the effect of organic solvents on the efficiency and selectivity of the bioprocess. Biocatalysis in a two-phase system is often more effective than in water or polar organic solvents, especially for hydrolases. Enzyme selectivity is conditioned by conformational rigidity, which increases in a more hydrophobic medium. A hydrophobic solvent decreases biocatalyst lability, which prevents binding of a structurally mismatched substrate to the active site of an enzyme [
48,
49,
50]. Water/organic solvent two-liquid-phase systems were successfully used by M.C. Fragnelli et al. and S. Oda et al. in the synthesis of enantiomerically pure (
S)-benzoin [
33,
34]. The enantioselectivity of the reaction was increased in hydrophobic solvents such as hexane, heptane, and isooctane. The presence of a cosolvent promoted the deracemization reaction without the simultaneous occurrence of reduction activities towards benzoin [
33]. We bioreduced benzil with added cosolvents using hexane, cyclohexane,
tert-butyl methyl ether (TBME), tetrahydrofuran (THF), acetonitrile (AcCN), and ionic liquids (Bmim)(BF
4) and (Bmim)(PF
6) (
Table 5). No increase in the optical efficiency of the (
S)-isomer was observed; however, after 24 h in a solution of phosphate buffer mixed with organic solvents at a 10:1 ratio (
v/
v), the presence of TBME, AcCN, and THF promoted the growth of (
R)-benzoin in the mixture. The highest excess of the (
R)-enantiomer was observed in the buffer: THF and buffer: AcCN mixtures at pH 5.5 and 6.0, respectively.
For the evaluation of the enantioselective properties of the microorganism in benzil reduction, a time profile was established by determining the composition of the reaction mixture over time. The reaction was stopped after 2 and 4 h. Optimal conditions were selected, incubation at 30 °C with glucose as energy source and 1 × 10
−5 mol of substrate. The results are shown in
Table 6. Both in the second and fourth hour, the reaction was practically non-selective. After two hours, the highest ee of (
S)-benzoin was obtained in solutions at pH 7.0 and 7.5: 61% and 66%, respectively. However, after 4 h, in each case a slight increase in the (
R)-isomer content in the mixture was observed, similarly as after 2 h in a solution with pH 5.0–6.0. This result is in apparent contradiction to the previous hypothesis that for 1 × 10
−5 mol of
1, dehydrogenase with (
S)-stereopreference selectively reduces the symmetrical diaryl diketone. It seems that only stereoinversion (deracemization) of the stereogenic benzoin atom can explain the situation. Stereoinversion of secondary alcohols can occur by concurrent tandem biocatalytic oxidation and reduction. If one of the enantiomers is selectively oxidized to carbonyl and then there is a selective reduction to the opposite enantiomer, enantiomeric enrichment of the mixture with the specified enantiomer can be observed. For this reason, a significant contribution of the (
S)-isomer is observed after 24 h.
This is confirmed by data in the literature, which show that during the reduction of benzil using microbiological methods, selective oxidation of (
R)-benzoin to benzil occurs. Increased oxidative activity was observed by M.C. Fragnelli et al. in a two-liquid-phase system [
33] and by A. S. Demir et al. in a phosphate buffer at different pH values [
31]. The process of stereoinversion might be caused by the activity of different dehydrogenases: one of them selectively oxidizes (
R)-benzoin to diketone and the other—(
S)-selective dehydrogenase with a high affinity towards benzil—reduces it to the (
S)-isomer. In order to determine how stereoinversion affects the optical purity of the product, we biotransformed
rac-benzoin over time (
Table 7). After 2 h, there was practically no reduction to diol, only deracemization which led to a significant percentage of the (
S)-enantiomer (up to 95% ee), due to the selective oxidation of the isomer of the opposite configuration. Kinetic resolution of the racemate through enantioselective oxidation was observed. In the fourth hour, the (
S)-enantiomer contribution was modulated by three competitive reactions: oxidation of benzoin to benzil, reduction of benzil to benzoin, and bioconversion of benzoin to hydrobenzoin. An increased percentage of benzil and (
R,
R)-hydrobenzoin (pH 5.0, 6.0–7.0, 7.5, and 8.0) or (
S,
S)-hydrobenzoin (pH 5.5 and 7) was observed. However, after 24 h, the situation was further complicated due to the presence of an additional oxidation reaction of the previously obtained hydrobenzoin to benzoin. The optical purity of benzoin was a result of all these competitive reactions. The highest ee of (
S)-enantiomer was obtained in a solution with pH 6.5 (84%).
2.2. Enantioselective Bioreduction Reaction of Benzil to the Corresponding (R)-Benzoin
The increase in substrate concentration contributed to the reduced proportion of (
S)-benzoin in the mixture after 24 h of reaction, especially for lower pH values (
Table 1). In order to obtain an excess of the
R-configuration enantiomer, we decided to bioreduce the prochiral diketone in a solution with pH 5.0 and 5.5 for higher reagent concentrations. The results are shown in
Table 8.
The change in stereobias with increasing concentration of substrate could be explained taking into account the possible presence of more than one alcohol dehydrogenase with different enantioselectivity inside the cell. Oxidoreductases, contained in the microorganism, act competitively to each other by transferring the hydride (pro-S or pro-R) from the nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD(P)H) cofactor to one of the sides of the prochiral carbonyl group (face si or re). The final ee of the product results from the reduction reactions occurring at different rates, carried out by a set of oxidoreductases, and the hydroacetone deracemization reaction. We observed that with the increase of reagent concentration, the reduction reaction proceeded more slowly, so that after the prolonged reaction time, another dehydrogenase could start acting. Under favorable conditions, with a correspondingly higher substrate concentration and prolonged reaction time, the (S)-isomer of benzil can be deracemized. The diketone can then be converted by (R)-dehydrogenase to the corresponding (R)-benzoin, despite the (S)-selective dehydrogenase showing a higher affinity for benzil. The effectiveness of bioconversion is usually strongly affected by substrate concentrations. A decrease in the catalytic activity of the microorganism is observed to increase as the concentration of the reagent increases. It can be presumed that too high a concentration of the substrate may be inhibitory to dehydrogenases, especially those with (S)-stereopreference, resulting in a decrease in their chemical efficiency and an increased contribution of the enantiomer of the R configuration. Finally, after 5 days, up to 79% ee was obtained for (R)-benzoin in a solution at pH 5.5. However, the highest ee of 93% was obtained after 7 days in a solution at pH 5.0 for 1 × 10−4 mol of 1.
For 5 × 10
−5 of
1, benzil reduction was carried out in the presence of potential inhibitors (
Table 9). Compared with the results presented in
Table 4, a significant effect of reagent concentration on the enantioselectivity of the bioprocess was observed. In each case, the reaction mixture was enriched by the (
R)-isomer, although with a fairly low degree of conversion.
In the most promising cases with ee above 60%, the diketone bioreduction reaction was performed using selected (
S)-dehydrogenase inhibitors under the same conditions and with the reaction time prolonged to 5 days. Results are shown in
Table 10.
As a result, in solutions with a pH value of 7.0 to 7.5, selectivity and biotransformation efficiency were improved in the presence of selected additives. Optimal results were obtained in a phosphate buffer solution of pH 7.0, using 4-methylpentan-2-one as selective inhibitor. Ee reached 91%.
The effect of additives on the selectivity of
rac-benzoin bioconversion was subsequently determined. As the highest enantiomeric excess, in most cases (except cysteine and ethyl chloroacetate), was obtained in a solution with a pH value of 7.5, the reaction under these conditions was carried out for both amount of
rac-
2: 1 × 10
−5 and 5 × 10
−5 mol (
Table 11).
Surprisingly, the bioconversion reaction of rac-benzoin at a reagent amount of 1 × 10−5 mol was not selective. A significant proportion of diketone in the mixture was found, which suggests promoting oxidation rather than reduction. On the other hand, for a higher concentration of the reagent, besides the non-selective deracemization reaction, an increase in the bioreduction reaction rate was observed. In the presence of 3-methylbutan-2-one and 4-methylpentan-2-one, diol with the (R,R) configuration was obtained as the main product, pointing out the occurrence of the reduction activity of dehydrogenases. The (R,R): meso ratio was 2.5:1 and 2.3:1 for 3-methylbutan-2-one and 4-methylpentan-2-one, respectively. The (S,S)-isomer was detected using reaction with cysteine ((S,S): meso 1.7:1). In other cases, the predominant isomer obtained was the meso compound. The highest composition of this isomer was accumulated in the reaction medium using ethyl chloroacetate as additive ((S,S): meso 1:6). Based on the results obtained, it can be assumed that by performing a more detailed optimization of the reaction conditions, it will be possible to obtain a diol with the desired configuration.