Abstract
Biocatalytic transformations that leverage the selectivity and efficiency of enzymes represent powerful tools for the construction of complex natural products. Enabled by innovations in genome mining, bioinformatics, and enzyme engineering, synthetic chemists are now more than ever able to develop and employ enzymes to solve outstanding chemical problems, one of which is the reliable and facile generation of stereochemistry within natural product scaffolds. In recognition of this unmet need, our group has sought to advance novel chemoenzymatic strategies to both expand and reinvigorate the chiral pool. Broadly defined, the chiral pool comprises cheap, enantiopure feedstock chemicals that serve as popular foundations for asymmetric total synthesis. Among these building blocks, amino acids and enantiopure terpenes, whose core structures can be mapped onto several classes of structurally and pharmaceutically intriguing natural products, are of particular interest to the synthetic community.In this Account, we summarize recent efforts from our group in leveraging biocatalytic transformations to expand the chiral pool, as well as efforts toward the efficient application of these transformations in natural products total synthesis, the ultimate testing ground for any novel methodology. First, we describe several examples of enzymatic generation of noncanonical amino acids as means to simplify the synthesis of peptide natural products. By extracting amino acid hydroxylases from native biosynthetic pathways, we obtain efficient access to hydroxylated variants of proline, lysine, arginine, and their derivatives. The newly installed hydroxyl moiety then becomes a chemical handle that can facilitate additional complexity generation, thereby expanding the pool of amino acid-derived building blocks available for peptide synthesis. Next, we present our efforts in enzymatic C-H oxidations of diverse terpene scaffolds, in which traditional chemistry can be combined with strategic applications of biocatalysis to selectively and efficiently derivatize several commercial terpenoid skeletons. The synergistic logic of this approach enables a small handful of synthetic intermediates to provide access to a plethora of terpenoid natural product families. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the advantages of applying enzymes in total synthesis in conjunction with established methodologies, as well as toward the expansion of the chiral pool to enable facile incorporation of stereochemistry during synthetic campaigns.