A novel synthetic route towards the polymer poly-ε-caprolactone based on a chemoenzymatic reaction sequence was developed.

Whole-cell biocatalysts are versatile tools in (industrial) production processes; though, the effects that impact the efficiency are not fully understood yet. One main factor that affects whole-cell biocatalysts is the surrounding medium, which often consists of organic solvents due to low solubility of substrates in aqueous solutions. It is expected that organic solvents change the biophysical and biochemical properties of the whole-cell biocatalysts, e.g. by permeabilising the cell membrane, and thus analysis of these effects is of high importance. In this work, we present an analysis method to study the impact of organic solvents on whole-cell biocatalysts by means of dielectrophoresis. For instance, we evaluate the changes of the characteristic dielectrophoretic trapping ratio induced by incubation of Escherichia coli, serving as a model system, in an aqueous medium containing isopropyl alcohol. Therefore, we could evaluate the impact on the electric polarisability of the cells. For this purpose, a special microchannel device was designed and Escherichia coli cells were genetically modified to reliably synthesise a green fluorescent protein. We could demonstrate that our method was capable of revealing different responses to small changes in isopropyl alcohol concentration and incubation duration. Complementary spectrophotometric UV-Vis (ultraviolet-visible light) absorbance analysis of released NAD(P) + /NAD(P)H cofactor and proteins confirmed our results. Based on our results, we discuss the biophysical effects taking place during incubation.

For an alternative synthetic approach toward the heterocyclic industrial chemical ε‐caprolactone, which is based on a biocatalytic oxidation of readily available cyclohexanol with air in aqueous media (using an alcohol dehydrogenase and a Baeyer–Villiger monooxygenase as enzyme components), a solvent engineering has been carried out identifying isooctane as a suitable co‐solvent. Biotransformations in an aqueous‐isooctane biphasic solvent system were found to proceed faster at both investigated substrate concentrations of 40 and 80 mm, respectively, compared with the analogous enzymatic reactions in pure aqueous medium. In addition, in all cases quantitative conversions were observed after a reaction time of 23 h when using isolated enzymes. The achievements indicate a high compatibility of isooctane [10%(v/v)] with the enzymes as well as the potential for an in situ removal of the organic reaction components, thus decreasing inhibition and/or destabilization effects of these organic components on the enzymes used. In contrast, so far, the use of recombinant whole‐cells gave less satisfactory results, which might be due to limitations of the permeation of, for example, the substrate through the cell membrane.