• KSBB Journal
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.311-316
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• 2005

Epoxide hydrolases (EHs) are versatile biocatalysts for the preparation of chiral epoxides by enantioselective hydrolysis from racemic epoxides. Various microorganisms were identified to possess a EH activity by multiple sequence alignment and analysis of conserved domain sequence from genomic and megaplasmid sequence data. We successfully isolated Gordonia westfalica possessing EH activity from various microbial strains from culture type collections. G. westfalica exhibited (R)-styrene oxide preferred enantioselective hydrolysis activity. Chiral (S)-styrene oxide with high optical purity $(>\;99\%)\;ee)$ and yield of $36.5\%$ was obtained from its racemate using whole-cell of G. westfalica.