Oxygen provides the driving force for many vital chemical reactions. Two well-known examples include respiration, the process that allows living things to break down food to release its energy, and combustion, reactions that produce heat and light. But oxygen has an unusual electronic configuration that tends to slow reactions with organic matter, so reactions often need help to get started. In nature, specialized proteins called enzymes can activate oxygen on demand by first rearranging its electrons. Now, a team led by Penn State researchers has developed a synthetic mimic of one of these enzymes, driving an enzyme-like reaction. This reaction, like its analog in nature, produces only water as waste. The research could potentially be used in sustainable industrial chemical syntheses and pharmaceutical drug development.
A paper describing the synthetic enzyme was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
"Oxygen is a marvelous molecule; it is produced by photosynthesis making it essentially the sun's energy stored in chemical form," said Jonathan Kuo, assistant professor of chemistry in the Penn State Eberly College of Science and the leader of the research team. "This energy is why you can have a campfire. When oxygen reacts with organic matter, it can become a runaway reaction; we call that combustion. Luckily for us, the oxygen molecule, which occurs as a bonded pair of oxygen atoms referred to as dioxygen, has an unusual electronic configuration, which makes it hard to get the fire started. So, we have plenty of oxygen to breathe, without worrying about everything organic spontaneously combusting."
