C-C Bond Formation Using Top Performing Enzymes

Industrial Biotechnology is a Key Enabling Technology under Horizon 2020, expected to boost technological innovation and industrial leadership in the EU.

It can improve chemical processes in compliance with the principles of Green Chemistry and effectively address social, environmental and economic needs.

Assembling simple fragments to build larger, more complex products is an essential technology at the heart of industrial organic synthesis.

With traditional chemical methods, CC bond formation (carboligation) is difficult to control selectively, whereas enzymes can catalyze carboligation with excellent precision.

Such addition reactions are ideally suited for industrial applications, being highly atom-efficient and producing no waste material.

For unleashing the vast, hidden treasury of enzymatic carboligation, the CC-TOP consortium has identified and will address a number of critical needs, technology gaps, practical challenges and synthetic opportunities presenting a huge potential for innovation.

The main goal of the CC-TOP ETN is to deliver tailored training and education to 15 top early-career researchers on cuttingedge carboligation enzyme technology and its translation into efficient Industrial Biotechnology applications, i.e. production of chiral fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

The training will be implemented within an established network of worldleading European academic institutions and industrial partners, forming strong interdisciplinary relations through cosupervision and inter-sectoral secondments of the ESRs.

The networks aim for efficient translation of breakthrough technology into industrial applications is emphasized through the implementation of an industrial skills module involving all ESRs.

CC-TOP combines leading-edge discovery technologies with state-of-the-art protein engineering and structural biology methods to specifically optimize process-validated carboligases for scalable applications in Industrial Biotechnology.