Abstract:

Chiral alcohols are key building blocks for many industrial products, such as pharmaceuticals and other high value compounds. Although several synthetic methods for the production of chiral alcohols from ketones are known, biocatalysis is one of the most important tools because of its high chemo-, regio- and stereoselectivity, as well as mild and environmentally friendly reaction conditions. Isolated keto reductases or whole-cell biological systems can be used as catalysts to this conversion, and studies seeking new sources of these enzymes have been carried out. It is well established that the screening of a wide variety of microorganisms, which are living in our environment, is one of the methods to obtain new biocatalysts. In this work some conidial fungi from the semi-arid region as biocatalysts in the reduction process of acetophenone to identified potential producers of keto reductases were evaluated.