Multi-Step Syntheses in Biology & Chemistry

Dear Colleagues,

Bio- and chemocatalysis are among today’s key technologies that will shape not only the industrial landscape but also our daily lives in the future. This interdisciplinary field of research, which combines biology and chemistry, opens great perspectives for basic research as well as for industrial applications. A particular opportunity and, at the same time, a challenge is to combine various synthetic steps catalyzed by enzymes and/or man-made catalysts towards multi-step syntheses. Such synthetic cascades can enable novel pathways to obtain the molecules required by various components of the industrial product tree, e.g., pharmaceuticals. The combination of individual steps for a compound synthesis can proceed in a sequential fashion with intermediate isolation of the product of interest or by merging these reactions within a one-pot cascade. Such processes consisting of multiple steps might be based only on the use of enzymes or chemocatalysts or can be realized by integrating both “worlds of catalysts” within a synthetic pathway. Addressing these fascinating research areas, this Special Issue will focus on the fields of tailor-made bio-catalyst design and applications thereof, combination of biocatalysis and chemocatalysis, and synthetic biology towards multi-step syntheses from both an academic and an industrial perspective. In addition, recent trends, so far mostly emerging from the area of chemocatalysis but expected to have a strong impact on biocatalysis in the future, will be addressed such as, for example, flow chemistry and machine learning self-automatization. Although this Special Issue is being organized on the occasion of the 13^th International CeBiTec Symposium “Multi-Step Syntheses in Biology & Chemistry—An International Young Investigator Conference” that will be held at Bielefeld University on December 2–4, 2019, the invitation to submit manuscripts is open to all colleagues active in this research field. Thus, submission of manuscripts from researchers reporting their latest results on these above-mentioned topics are very much welcome.

Prof. Dr. Harald Gröger
Guest Editor

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