Lipids and Lipases - Combination Products From Renewables

Agricultural crops represent a considerable reservoir of useful and low cost raw materials like fats and oils, plant proteins and carbohydrates. By selective combination of their molecular constituents (e.g. fatty acids, glycerol, amino acids, mono- and disaccharides, amino sugars etc.) a wide variety of surface active materials can be prepared, all of them - due to their molecular structures - being potentially highly biodegradable.
Lipases are well established biocatalysts for the selective formation of ester and amide bonds and thus ideally suited for the preparation of combination products with surface active properties such as partial glycerides, N-acylated amino acids and sugar esters. A common problem associated with enzymatic acylations of hydrophilic materials in hydrophobic aprotic organic solvents is the low solubility of the above substrates in such media. Consequently, practical solutions had to be developed in order to obtain acceptable yields. Using a) immobilizations on solid supports, b) supersaturated solutions and c) temporary protection groups acceptable results were achieved in most cases. In the lecture examples for the preparation of the above product lines will be discussed, this also in context with similar activities in other research groups.