McCamley Lecture: How far can we push bipyridylalanine in artificial metalloenzymes design?

Genetic code expansion has drastically increased the number of amino acids we can incorporate into protein scaffolds, and includes a number of metal-binding amino acids. Bipyridylalanine is of particular interest to biocatalyst designers as bipyridine is a well-known ligand in coordination chemistry and has been extensively studied by the chemical community in multiple applications over the last 100 years. As a rigid bidentate ligand, it offers different structural binding motifs to the canonical amino acids and the possibility of building up very different metal active sites to enable new-to-nature chemistry to be introduced to metalloenzymes. In this talk I will describe my group’s forays into designing artificial metalloenzymes containing bipyridylalanine, including how we have confirmed the active site structures and their applications in Cu, Ru and Ir catalysis.