Enzymatic synthesis of sucrose esters: Advances and challenges in high-efficiency and regioselective catalysis

As an eco-friendly and non-toxic nonionic surfactant, enzymatically synthesized sucrose esters (SEs) are increasingly valued across the food, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical industries due to their environmentally benign production characteristics. However, current enzymatic synthesis faces several fundamental constraints, like limited diversity of enzyme resources restricting process versatility, insufficient catalytic activity and thermostability of enzymes leading to suboptimal reaction efficiency, and prohibitive enzyme production costs hindering industrial scalability. To address these critical challenges, this review presents a systematic summarize of SEs synthetic technologies and their emerging applications, with particular emphasis on elucidating enzymatic synthetic mechanisms. Due to limited enzyme resources, we innovatively propose a high-throughput bioinformatics-driven enzyme mining platform that employs SEs synthase sequences as molecular probes for screening the SEs synthases, identifying previously uncharacterized enzyme candidates with potentially enhanced catalytic efficiencies. Through systematic bottleneck analysis and a forward-looking perspective, our work establishes a theoretical foundation for developing cost-effective enzymatic processes while providing a valuable repository of potential enzyme candidates for the first time. These findings offer useful guidelines for promoting enzymatic SEs production.