Reaction Design for the Compartmented Combination of Heterogeneous and Enzyme Catalysis

The combination of a heterogeneously catalyzed reaction with a biotransformation as a one-pot cascade process is an important strategy to reduce costs, time, and labor efforts in the production of chemicals from biogenic resources. Although one-pot cascade-type approaches generally result in more efficient chemical processes by reducing the number of workup operations needed and time consumed, the combination of different types of catalysts, both chemical and enzymatic, into a single reaction vessel often remains challenging. During our study, aimed at the direct synthesis of 2-keto-3-deoxy sugar acids as one intermediate toward biobased building blocks starting from the corresponding sugars by combining heterogeneous inorganic catalysis with enzyme catalysis, we encountered several incompatibility problems. These were overcome by a chemoenzymatic method in different compartments, which involves the gold-catalyzed direct oxidation by molecular oxygen and the subsequent conversion of the sugar acids through an enzymatic dehydration step. The described procedure represents an efficient synthesis route toward four different 2-keto-3-deoxy sugar acids and serves as a proof of concept for the combination of one-pot-incompatible catalysts under continuous flow.