Amino acids that are not only important components of living organisms, but also involved in various functional materials such as feed additives, flavor enhancers, and pharmaceuticals.It is said that production by the fermentation method requires a large amount of energy for culturing microorganisms and that the separation and purification process is complicated. In the chemical synthesis method, toxic substances are used, so foods are used.・ It is avoided for pharmaceutical use.

　In this research, a method of highly selective reaction of an organic acid called α-keto acid, which can be extracted from woody biomass, with a nitrogen-containing compound using electric power as an energy source and water as a hydrogen source, with high efficiency of 7 kinds of amino acids. Successful synthesis.Of these, aspartic acid, leucine, phenylalanine and tyrosine are the first to be synthesized using electrical energy.
So far, there have been cases where amino acid synthesis was performed on electrodes of toxic lead, mercury, or expensive platinum, but the synthesis efficiency was very low.On the other hand, this method, which achieves highly selective amino acid synthesis using safer and cheaper titanium oxide as an electrode catalyst, can be said to be a new low environmental load type fine chemical production method.

　Furthermore, in this research, we succeeded in constructing a flow-type reactor that continuously synthesizes amino acids for the first time in the world, and since it is possible to produce economical and environmentally friendly and sustainable amino acids, it is a breakthrough synthesis in the future. It is attracting attention as a law.

Paper information:[Chemical Communications] Electrosynthesis of amino acids from biomass-derivable acids on titanium dioxide