细胞具有精确、高效的分子合成能力,细胞内复杂的多酶体系具有纳米尺度多层次构建的基本特征,纳米邻近效应、区域化效应、限域效应等是其高效催化的重要基础."去细胞之复杂,取细胞之精华",提取细胞生物催化关键元件,并以化学催化替代其中的局限步骤,模拟细胞内多级结构和纳米效应,设计简单、高效、稳定的生物-化学复合纳米催化剂,有望再现甚至超越细胞的催化能力,为传统工业生物催化提供革新技术.本项目以化学工业可持续发展的需求为导向,重点研究生物-化学复合纳米催化剂构筑及其工业化应用中的重要科学问题,并探索应用于手性化合物制备的工业催化过程.
The development of biotechnology has made it possible to easily design and produce enzyme as needed, providing a powerful tool for the wide application of enzymatic catalysis in the fields of pharmaceutical production, bioanalysis, food manufacturing and fine chemicals industry. Enzymes with abundant catalytic functions and high catalytic activity and stereo-selectivity in the preparation of chiral compounds in the chemical industry are expected to improve the purity of the products, shorten the production process and simplify the separation of products. The cells which containing multiple enzymes inside have the ability of accurate and highly efficient synthesis. The multi-enzyme complex in cells has the characteristics of nano-scale and multi-level construction. The nano-proximity effect, compartmentalization effect and confinement effect are the important basis of efficient enzymatic catalysis in cells. However, the direct use of cells as catalysts in industry may cause a high cost, complex interference within the multiple enzymatic reactions, limited mass transfer within cell walls, difficulty in product separation due to the emulsion effect of cells and other shortcomings. On the other hand, with the rapid progress of nanotechnology, especially nanocatalysis in recent years, inorganic nanocatalysts can catalyze abundant non-natural reactions very efficiently, and can easily realize the physical and chemical processes of electron transfer and photo-electric conversion. The combination of biocatalysts and inorganic nanocatalysts opens new possibilities to mimic the complex catalysis processes in nature, and also provides a new way for the efficient utilization of energy and matter in biochemical manufacturing. It is an emerging and promising topic in the field of catalysis and is expected to provide new catalytic technologies for the green and sustainable chemical industry. Inspired by the intracellular multi-level organization and nano-effects of biocatalytic machines of cells and based on the concept of "S