Question

If the enzyme responsible for this reduction is an alcohol dehydrogenase (an enzyme that reduces ketones and aldehydes to alcohols and oxidizes alcohols to ketones and aldehydes), how might you drive the reaction to farther completion? ***This is from a Chem lab regarding reudction of ethyl acetoacetate using Baker's yeast.

Answer 1

This reaction is an in-vivo reduction of the ketone functionality in ethylacetoacetate and due to the highly specific nature of enzymatic reactions ester functionality will be left unreacted.

Yeast used here is the reducing agent and usually performed at 30°C ,1 atm and pH 7-8.

This is a chiral reaction. 100ml water,39g sucrose,3,5g bakers yeast has to be heated for an hour.4g of ethyl aceto acetate has to be added and for the further completion of the reaction,mixture must be allowed to ferment for a week.