Nano-Immobilization

Enzymes possess great potential in catalytic processes because of their environmental friendliness, low cost, high specificity, and mild reaction conditions. Despite the desirable characteristics of enzymes and their widespread use in many applications such as biosensors, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and foods are often obstructing by their lack of long-term operational stability and short lifetime. Enzyme immobilization is one of the strategies to overcome these obstacles as it optimizes the operational performance of an enzyme for industrial applications. Moreover, immobilization also improves many enzymatic properties such as enzyme catalysis, by providing a support associated with low synthesis cost and high binding capacity. Nanotechnology is an area through which numerous materials are constructed at the nanoscale. Nanoparticles such as chitosan, graphene, silica, polymers, magnetic, and nanoflowers are extensively used for immobilization. With the progress of this technology, the use of nanomaterials has increased because of their distinctive physicochemical properties including the high specific surface area and reactivity which in turn constitute a novel and interesting matrices for enzyme immobilization. The immobilization method of enzyme onto nanostructured carriers can determine biocatalysts efficiencies such as specific surface area, excellent dispersibility, mass transfer resistance, and efficient enzyme loading. Immobilization of enzymes to the nanoparticles can enhance enzymatic thermal stability and activity in aqueous and non-aqueous media. Nanoparticle-based enzyme immobilization served the following important features such as the ability to deposit on a small surface area and creating hybrid assemblies. Nanoparticles greatly affect the mechanical properties of the enzyme by

• Increasing life cycles for its re-use
• Reducing the cost
• Improving stiffness and elasticity
• Providing biocompatible environments for its immobilization

The enzymes immobilized on nanoparticles are generally more stable and are finer to the other chemical as well as biological methods. These biocatalysts encapsulation methods rarely affect enzyme’s internal specific biocatalytic activity and are broadly used in major fields including medicine, fragrances, biosensing, clinic diagnostic, pharmaceuticals especially in cancer treatment and flavors. Nonporous and porous nanoparticles are difficult to recover which increases the cost, therefore magnetic nanoparticles including graphene, silica, and polymer ferric oxide have been effectively introduced into immobilizing composites. To prevent the inactivation of biocatalyst, nucleotide-hybrid metal coordination polymers can entrap various proteins and nanoparticles. The emerging innovation of nanocatalyst (NBC), produced by immobilizing enzymes with functional nanostructured carriers fuses the synergistic effects of advanced nanotechnology with biotechnology promises exhilarating applications for improving enzymatic properties in bioprocessing applications. Carbohydrate hydrolysis, biofuel production, and biotransformation are some of the applications of nanocatalyst. Both single-walled and multiwalled carbon nanotubes are used for enzyme immobilization. Being robust and more resistant to environmental changes, immobilized enzymes provide a reusable method for the production of chemicals. They can be used as biosensors for the identification of different bioactive compounds in diagnosis and exploring new strategic applications to improve our development in the future.

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