Shiyu Zhang, Ohio State University
Modeling Enzymatic Reactivity with Copper Coordination Complexes
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Ohio State University
Synthetic models of enzyme intermediates play an important role in evaluating mechanistic hypotheses for critical biochemical reactions. In the first part of my talk, I will present the synthesis of tricopper clusters as small-molecule models of multicopper oxidases, a class of copper proteins that catalyze four-electron reduction of O2 to H2O. We found that an enzyme-like macrocyclic ligand can provide the rigid coordination environment to support multi-electron multi-proton transfers at tricopper clusters. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss how synthetic models of monocopper oxygenases can be applied in the synthesis of pharmaceutically relevant organic molecules. Inspired by lytic polysaccharide monooxygenases, we develop a catalytic C-H fluorination method that selectively produces monofluorinated products in an undivided electrochemical cell at room temperature.