Abstract
16,17-Epoxysterol plays an important role in pharmaceutical steroid synthesis. To investigate the potential application of cytochrome P450 for epoxysterol synthesis, an approach to the epoxidation of 16,17-epoxysterol, based on directed evolution of cytochrome P450 BM-3, was developed. This comprised random gene mutagenesis for optimizing the activity of P450 BM-3 for epoxidation of hydrophobic sterol, followed by the 7-ethoxycoumarin de-ethylation assay for general enzyme activity detection and the modified picric acid assay for epoxidation activity screening. By the two-step screening, one mutant from 792 clones showed specific substrate activity of converting progesterone to 16,17-epoxysterol, which validated the possibility to evolve the cytochrome P450 for the synthesis of steroidal epoxides.
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