PhD student article selected as Editors’ Choice by leading chemistry society

An article by the School of Chemistry’s PhD student Antonio Angelastro, supported by Drs William Dawson and Louis Luk, has been selected as the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Editors’ Choice after being published in ACS Catalysis, a leading journal in the field.

In the article entitled “A versatile disulfide-driven recycling system for NADP⁺ with high cofactor turnover number” Antonio, a postgraduate student it the group of Prof Rudolf Allemann, describes a new methodology for recycling nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP⁺). NADP⁺ is a naturally found chemical used in many biocatalytic processes to generate high value chemicals for the pharmaceutical and food industries.
The ACS editors selected the article because of its potential for broad public interest. As an Editors’ Choice article, it is sponsored for immediate, free open access, an honour given to only one article from the entire ACS portfolio of publications each day of the year.

NADP⁺ is an expensive reagent (£ 9,000 per kg) and so recycling schemes have previously been investigated, but their application is severely limited by the low total turnover numbers (TTN) for the cofactor. Antonio’s article demonstrates a glutathione-based recycling system that combines glutaredoxin from E. coli (EcGRX) and the glutathione reductase from S. cerevisiae (ScGR) for NADP⁺ regeneration resulting in a high cofactor turnover number. Impressively, this work shows that the glutathione system can reduce the original cost of NADP⁺-dependent biocatalytic processes up to 500,000-fold, a reduction that cannot be achieved by any other recycling schemes.

A cost-effective, efficient and environmentally friendly recycling system for the relatively expensive and only marginally stable enzyme cofactor NADP⁺, as presented in the article, could offer significant benefits in academic and industrial settings.

To read the full article, please visit the ACS Catalysis publication page.

Following publication, this research has been featured in volume 95 of the Chemical & Engineering News magazine. To access the article, which features on page 9 in the Science and Technology section of the magazine, online you will need to log in with your ACS ID.