Re-Make/Re-Model: Recent breakthroughs on the road to practicable and diversified biocatalytical processes

Biocatalysis has been traditionally used when high chemo-, regio- and stereoselectivity under mild conditions (pH, pressure, temperature). Contrariwise, low productivity and low catalyst stability generally represent major constraints for obtaining intense preparative processes. Moreover, the diversity of reactions obtainable by biocatalysis is still limited. Indeed, over the last 12 months we have witnessed a large effort to obtain new biocatalysts and intensified transformation processes. Improvement and diversification involve engineering of the different components of that characterize (overall) a biocatalytic process: substrate, medium, protein, biocatalyst and bioreactor engineering. Therefore, we have selected papers of 2017 that meaningfully contributed to the advance of biocatalysis either by improving existing concepts or by suggesting new directions (new reactions, new techniques. Most of these papers are strongly multidisciplinary, entailing techniques and notions from different fields (chemistry, chemical engineering, biochemistry, molecular biology, bioinformatics, microbiology) for engineering and intensifying biocatalytic processes, while a strong effort has been devoted to the design of the catalytic repertoire of natural enzymes to functions new to biological systems.