Synthetic biology approaches in drug discovery and pharmaceutical biotechnology

Synthetic biology is the attempt to apply the concepts of engineering to biological systems with the aim to create organisms with new emergent properties. These organisms might have desirable novel biosynthetic capabilities, act as biosensors or help us to understand the intricacies of living systems. This approach has the potential to assist the discovery and production of pharmaceutical compounds at various stages. New sources of bioactive compounds can be created in the form of genetically encoded small molecule libraries. The recombination of individual parts has been employed to design proteins that act as biosensors, which could be used to identify and quantify molecules of interest. New biosynthetic pathways may be designed by stitching together enzymes with desired activities, and genetic code expansion can be used to introduce new functionalities into peptides and proteins to increase their chemical scope and biological stability. This review aims to give an insight into recently developed individual components and modules that might serve as parts in a synthetic biology approach to pharmaceutical biotechnology

Chemoselective Cross-Coupling Reactions with Differentiation between Two Nucleophilic Sites on a Single Aromatic Substrate

A new thiophene building block, containing both a stannyl group and a boronic ester, was prepared. From this starting material, a general, nucleophile-selective one-pot reaction was developed, exploiting the different reactivities of the Stille and Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling reactions. A series of aromatic electrophiles were used to demonstrate the high functional group tolerance