Aromatic nitro compounds are key building blocks for many industrial syntheses and are also components of explosives, drugs and pesticides. Due to the environmentally unfriendly experimental conditions involved in their chemical syntheses, industrial processes would benefit from the use of biocatalysts. Among potentially useful enzymes, N-oxygenases, whose role is to oxygenate primary amines, are becoming relevant. These enzymes are involved in different secondary metabolic pathways in Streptomyces and in few other bacteria, forming part of the enzyme pools implicated in antibiotic synthesis. In this work, a group of Streptomyces strains, whose biomass was obtained from simple and novel culture media, were identified as new sources of N-oxygenase activity. Furthermore, the use of unspecific metabolic stimulation strategies allowed substantial improvements in the activity of whole cells as biocatalysts. It is remarkable the 6 to 50-fold increase in nitro compound yields compared to the biotransformation under standard conditions when Streptomyces griseus was the biocatalyst. In addition, biocatalyst substrate acceptance was studied in order to determine the biocatalytic potential of this enzyme.

芳香族硝基化合物是许多工业合成的关键组成部分，也是炸药、药物和杀虫剂的成分。由于其化学合成涉及环境不友好的实验条件，工业过程将受益于生物催化剂的使用。在潜在有用的酶中，N-氧化酶，其作用是氧化伯胺，正变得相关。这些酶参与链霉菌属和少数其他细菌的不同次生代谢途径，构成与抗生素合成有关的酶库的一部分。在这项工作中，一组Streptomyces菌株，其生物量是从简单和新型培养基中获得的，被确定为N 的新来源-加氧酶活性。此外，使用非特异性代谢刺激策略可以显着提高整个细胞作为生物催化剂的活性。当灰色链霉菌是生物催化剂时，与标准条件下的生物转化相比，硝基化合物的产量增加了 6 到 50 倍，这一点非常显着。此外，还研究了生物催化剂底物接受度，以确定该酶的生物催化潜力。