Chemical Biology

As an organic synthetic intermediate, halogenated molecules are of particular importance in many metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. The effective catalyst control for C-H activation with traditional chemical halogenation methods is often impossible and imposes many challenges. The development of a concurrent method in which bio-engineered halogen moieties are reactively coupled with chemo catalysis has many potential applications such as large molecular library synthesis, in situ labelling, affinity tagging of proteins and biomolecules. The existence of specific regio-selective halogenases that act on electron rich aromatic substrates makes it logical to have enzymatic routes to create halogenated moieties for these approaches. We are actively adapting such methods from Synthetic Chemistry to develop new tools for the Chemical Biology research.