Chemical Engineering Journal, Vol.361, 286-293, 2019
Ecofriendly construction of enzyme reactor based on three-dimensional porous cryogel composites
Enzymes are considered as important green catalysts for industrial manufacturing. In this work, a new enzyme reactor is presented for providing a good biocompatible microenvironment to protect the original tertiary structure of enzymes and improve their catalytic performance. The reactor is based on a three-dimensional porous cryogel composite (named as pDM/P/Au), which is a kind of polymer (p) with diallyldimethylammonium chloride (DC) as a crosslinker, embedded with flowerlike metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), rapidly generating a polydopamine film (PD) and a well-proportioned nanogold (Au) interface. The pDM/P/Au cryogel with a high mechanical stability was fabricated by an ecofriendly semi-automation preparation strategy. All operations were carried out under mild reaction conditions in aqueous solution and without repeated drying. Trypsin was chosen as the model enzyme to be immobilized by the nanogold as the intermediate ligand, and the immobilized trypsin exhibited an efficient immobilization time (t=1 h), wide catalytic temperature (25-65 degrees C) and pH (6-10) range, good reusability (can be reused eight times) and storage stability (4 weeks, retaining higher than 80% residual activity). The Km and Vmax values were 17.9 mg/mL and 17.2 mu g/mL/min for the immobilized trypsin, and 13.9 mg/mL and 16.1 mu g/mL/min for free trypsin, respectively. The catalytic performance also demonstrated by protein digestion with bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a model protein and the digestion time was 1 min.