Although bioactive natural products have played significant roles in pharmaceutical research, their application potential is still limited by low isolated yields and structural modification challenges. To overcome these obstacles, developing environmentally friendly and highly efficient synthetic strategies offers exceptional approaches to obtain complex bioactive natural products and their analogs. Driven by advancements in microbial genetics and enzyme engineering, chemoenzymatic strategies, which merge enzymatic and synthetic transformations, are steadily emerging as potent tools in the synthesis of bioactive natural products, pharmaceutical components and other valuable molecules. These fashionable strategies offer not only advantages of chemical synthesis, such as simplicity, flexibility and scalability, but also those of biosynthesis, including environmental friendliness, high selectivity and efficiency. This will establish a linkage into the next-generation synthesis which is expected to break the boundary between chemistry and biology. Versatile cytochrome monooxygenases, P450s, can achieve inert C—H bond selective oxidation in mild and green conditions, a classically challenging organic transformation, providing novel retrosynthetic plans for complex natural products and becoming one of the hotspots in synthetic science. This review summarizes the recent applications of chemoenzymatic synthesis of natural products using P450-catalyzed site-selective oxidations as critical steps to improve the synthetic efficiency and avoid unnecessary functional group transformations and protection/deprotection steps, categorizing the case studies by structure features, such as steroids, terpenoids, and other types of natural products. At the end of this review, the current challenges in this field, such as heavily relying on the native activities of enzymes, are also analyzed and discussed, along with emerging research directions and technologies in new enzyme mining and enzyme engineering that may provide solutions to these challenges in the future. With constantly cross fusion of biosynthesis, chemical synthesis, synthetic biology, protein engineering, machine learning and other research field, P450-catalyzed site-selective oxidations will be becoming routine tools for synthetic chemists.
| 科 Family | 属数 Number of genus | 种数 Number of species | 占总种数比例 Percentage of total species (%) | 属 Genus | 种数 Number of species | 占总种数比例 Percentage of total species (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 鹅膏菌科Amanitaceae | 2 | 11 | 5.26 | 鹅膏菌属 Amanita | 10 | 4.78 |
| 小菇科 Mycenaceae | 2 | 12 | 5.74 | 丝盖伞属 Inocybe | 5 | 2.39 |
| 多孔菌科 Polyporaceae | 8 | 14 | 6.70 | 蜡蘑属 Laccaria | 5 | 2.39 |
| 红菇科 Russulaceae | 3 | 23 | 11.00 | 小皮伞属 Marasmius | 6 | 2.87 |
| 小菇属 Mycena | 11 | 5.26 | ||||
| 光柄菇属 Pluteus | 5 | 2.39 | ||||
| 红菇属 Russula | 17 | 8.13 | ||||
| 栓菌属 Trametes | 5 | 2.39 |