Discovery, production and characterization of bacterial aryl-alcohol oxidases

Alcohol oxidation is a pivotal reaction in synthetic chemistry. Classical procedures typically involve the use of hypervalent reagents and organic solvents that often lead to poor selectivity, overoxidation issues and low atom-economy processes. The implementation of biocatalytic methods for this reaction is particularly appealing and several enzyme types have shown to catalyze this process although equilibrium issues, cofactor and coenzyme recycling or the use of external mediators limit the uptake of biocatalytic oxidations in large scale. Alcohol oxidases catalyze the non-reversible aerobic oxidation of alcohols to the corresponding carbonyls and have the potential to overcome current limitations in biocatalytic oxidations. In this chapter, we describe different protocols to find, obtain and characterize novel bacterial alcohol oxidases for synthetic chemistry.