Biocatalysis in Bioorthogonal Reactions: Use of Hydrolases and Transferases for Selective Modifications

Bioorthogonal chemistry explores a set of technologies to incorporate non-native functional groups into biological systems to understand the mechanism of biological processes in living organisms. Among the conjugation strategies available on the bench, the use of biocatalysis as part of bioorthogonal conjugation has been found to be one smart tool to achieve chemoselective functional group installation. The process designing utilizes high substrate specificity of biocatalyst, resulting in a targeted addition of a reactive non-native functional group to a native biomolecule followed by tagging with a suitably detectable moiety and thereby monitoring the salient biological processes involving the conjugated assembly. The present study tries to briefly address the synthetic strategies with mechanistic elaboration involving various transferases with different suitable models and the underlying reactions involved in bioorthogonal processes.