WelO5: New Halogenation Enzyme Discovered
Monday, September 15, 2014 - 19:01
in Biology & Nature
Molecules containing carbon-halogen bonds are produced naturally across all kingdoms of life and constitute a large family of natural products with a broad range of biological activities. The presence of halogen substituents in many bioactive compounds has a profound influence on their molecular properties and a goal of chemical science has been to find the late-stage, site-specific incorporation of a halogen atom into a complex natural product by replacing an sp³ C-H bond (one of the most inert chemical bonds known in an organic compound) with a C-X bond (X=halogen). There has been no reliable synthetic or biological method known to be able to achieve this type of transformation but in Nature Chemical Biology read more