A mechanistic perspective on the chemistry of biocatalytic desaturation

Desaturation is a fundamental transformation in both synthetic organic chemistry and essential biological processes. While chemical desaturation methods exhibit broad substrate tolerance, they often suffer from harsh reaction conditions and unsatisfactory selectivity. In contrast, natural desaturases achieve dehydrogenation with unrivalled regio- and stereoselectivity under mild conditions but are largely confined to their evolutionary substrates. In this review, we discuss enzymatic desaturations from the perspective of the reaction mechanism and compare them with chemical methods. This review highlights the different strategies that Nature and chemists use to execute this important transformation and shines light on future development of novel desaturation techniques.