one of the most important challenges facing the chemicals industry today is the need to adopt processes that are as clean and energy efficient as possible. It is crucial, therefore, that we search for environmentally benign ways of carrying out chemical reactions on a large scale.
Enzymes are nature’s catalysts. They are protein molecules that speed up chemical reactions, from the amylase in your saliva that breaks down starch, to enzymes that can detoxify chemicals in your body, or make lignin and cellulose in trees. The chemistry that enzymes use to catalyse is extraordinarily diverse, and this is even more astounding when we consider that, as proteins, enzymes are simply chains of 20 different amino acid monomers, each with a side chain that confers the particular chemical character on that amino acid: be it hydrophilic, hydrophobic, acidic or basic (see Figure 1 for examples and CHEMISTRY REVIEW, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 2–6).
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