Structural and kinetic studies on novel covalent flavoprotein oxidases: alditol oxidase and chitooligosaccharide oxidase

Flavoprotein oxidases represent an interesting class of enzymes because of their increasing interest to the fine-chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Owing to their high regio- and enantioselectivity and low costs, the use of oxidases is preferred over classical organic chemistry. A specific class of oxidases is formed by carbohydrate oxidases. Many flavin-harboring carbohydrate oxidases contain a vocalently linked FAD corfactor. Therefore, the approach used in this thesis to find carbohydrate oxidases was based on searching the genome databases for putative covalent FAD-containing proteins, thereby increasing the chance of finding an oxidase. We focused the search for novel carbohydrate oxidases on the vanillyl-alcohol oxidase family of flavoproteins. This family harbors a large number of putative covalent flavoproteins, and most known carbohydrate oxidases belong to this family.