Highly Productive Oxidative Biocatalysis in Continuous Flow by Enhancing the Aqueous Equilibrium Solubility of Oxygen.

We report a simple, mild, and synthetically clean approach to accelerate the rate of enzymatic oxidation reactions by a factor of up to 100 when compared to conventional batch gas/liquid systems. Biocatalytic decomposition of H ₂ O ₂ is used to produce a soluble source of O ₂ directly in reaction media, thereby enabling the concentration of aqueous O ₂ to be increased beyond equilibrium solubility under safe and practical conditions. To best exploit this method, a novel flow reactor was developed to maximize productivity (g product L ^-1  h ^-1 ). This scalable benchtop method provides a distinct advantage over conventional bio-oxidation in that no pressurized gas or specialist equipment is employed. The method is general across different oxidase enzymes and compatible with a variety of functional groups. These results culminate in record space-time yields for bio-oxidation.
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