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2014 Abstracts

Immobilizing Biocatalysts onto Surfaces

Christopher Hutchings, Brigham Young University

Engineering

The biocatalysis industry has been rapidly expanding due to the fact that there has been a greater demand for ecologically friendly manufacturing processes. The benefit of biocatalytic systems is that it enables stereo-, chemo-, and regio- specificity in chemical manufacturing. This in turn reduces wasteful byproducts from chemical manufacturing. This is especially valuable in industries where removal of chemically similar but physically harmful waste products is essential. The problem with the traditional biocatalytic processes is that they are hindered from limitations in areas such as enzyme stability, leaching, recoverability, and reusability. These limitations significantly impede the cost-effectiveness of biocatalysis for industrial applications. The processes of enzyme immobilization like adsorption, entrapment, and other such forms of immobilizations provide improvements such as stability, recoverability, and reusability. Though they provide improvements they also go through enzyme leaching, complicated or even toxic conjugation procedures and have a lack of specificity to attachment location from. This ends in being counterintuitive and defeats the purpose of enzyme immobilization. It is here we start to build upon the recent advancements in unnatural amino acid and incorporating them into enzymes to demonstrate a biocompatible and covalent enzyme immobilization process that improves protein stability and enables attachment orientation control. This system we refer to as the Protein Residue-Explicit Covalent Immobilization for Stability Enhancement or PRECISE system, and it permits the covalent attachment of enzymes at potentially any location on the enzyme onto a surface. Using this process, we create reusable enzymes that are more stable and more resistant to harsh conditions. We have also concluded from this process that there is no leaching and increased stability from immobilization with the enzyme with satisfactory results in enzyme activity.