Immobilization of Alcohol Dehydrogenase from E. coli onto Mesoporous Silica for Application as a Cofactor Recycling System

Local Environments Created by the Ligand Coating of Nanoparticles and Their Implications for Sensing and Surface Reactions

ConspectusThe ligand shells of colloidal nanoparticles (NPs) can serve different purposes. In general, they provide colloidal stability by introducing steric repulsion between NPs. In the context of biological applications, the ligand shell plays a critical role in targeting, enabling NPs to achieve specific biodistributions. However, there is also another important feature of the ligand shell of NPs, namely, the creation of a local environment differing from the bulk of the solvent in which the NPs are dispersed. It is known that charged ligand shells can attract or repel ions and change the effective charge of a NP through Debye-Hückel screening. Positively charged ions, such as H+ (or H3O+) are attracted to negatively charged surfaces, whereas negatively charged ions, such as Cl- are repelled. The distribution of the ions around charged NP surfaces is a radial function of distance from the center of the NP, which is governed by a balance of electrostatic forces and entropy of ions and ligands. As a result, the ion concentration at the NP surface is different from its bulk equilibrium concentration, i.e., the charged ligand shell around the NPs has formed a distinct local environment. This not only applies to charged ligand shells but also follows a more general principle of induced condensation and depletion. Polar/apolar ligand shells, for example, result in a locally increased concentration of polar/apolar molecules. Similar effects can be seen for biocatalysts like enzymes immobilized in nanoporous host structures, which provide a special environment due to their surface chemistry and geometrical nanoconfinement. The formation of a local environment close to the ligand shell of NPs has profound implications for NP sensing applications. As a result, analyte concentrations close to the ligand shell, which are the ones that are measured, may be very different from the analyte concentrations in bulk. Based on previous work describing this effect, it will be discussed herein how such local environments, created by the choice of used ligands, may allow for tailoring the NPs' sensing properties. In general, the ligand shell around NPs can be attractive/repulsive for molecules with distinct properties and thus forms an environment that can modulate the specific response. Such local environments can also be optimized to modulate chemical reactions close to the NP surface (for example, by size filtering within pores) or to attract specific low abundance proteins. The importance hereby is that this is based on interaction with low selectivity between the ligands and the target molecules.

Synthesis and characterization of ordered mesoporous silicas for the immobilization of formate dehydrogenase (FDH)

This work studied the influence of the pore size and morphology of the mesoporous silica as support for formate dehydrogenase (FDH), the first enzyme of a multi-enzymatic cascade system to produce methanol, which catalyzes the reduction of carbon dioxide to formic acid. Specifically, a set of mesoporous silicas was modified with glyoxyl groups to immobilize covalently the FDH obtained from Candida boidinii. Three types of mesoporous silicas with different textural properties were synthesized and used as supports: i) SBA-15 (D_P = 4 nm); ii) MCF with 0.5 wt% mesitylene/pluronic ratio (D_P = 20 nm) and iii) MCF with 0.75 wt% mesitylene/pluronic ratio (D_P = 25 nm). As a whole, the immobilized FDH on MCF_0.75 exhibited higher thermal stability than the free enzyme, with 75% of residual activity after 24 h at 50 °C. FDH/MCF_0.5 exhibited the best immobilization yields: 69.4% of the enzyme supplied was covalently bound to the support. Interestingly, the specific activity increased as a function of the pore size of support and then the FDH/MCF_0.75 exhibited the highest specific activity (namely, 1.05 IU/g_MCF0.75) with an immobilization yield of 52.1%. Furthermore, it was noted that the immobilization yield and the specific activity of the FDH/MCF_0.75 varied as a function of the supported enzyme: as the enzyme loading increased the immobilization yield decreased while the specific activity increased. Finally, the reuse test has been carried out, and a residual activity greater than 70% was found after 5 cycles of reaction.

Bioconversion of xylose to xylonic acid via co-immobilized dehydrogenases for conjunct cofactor regeneration

Enzymatic cofactor-dependent conversion of monosaccharides can be used in the bioproduction of value-added compounds. In this study, we demonstrate co-immobilization of xylose dehydrogenase (XDH, EC 1.1.1.175) and alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH, EC 1.1.1.1) using magnetite-silica core-shell particles for simultaneous conversion of xylose into xylonic acid (XA) and in situ cofactor regeneration. The reaction conditions were optimized by factorial design, and were found to be: XDH:ADH ratio 2:1, temperature 25 °C, pH 7, and process duration 60 min. Under these conditions enzymatic production of xylonic acid exceeded 4.1 mM and was more than 25% higher than in the case of a free enzymes system. Moreover, the pH and temperature tolerance as well as the thermo- and storage stability of the co-immobilized enzymes were significantly enhanced. Co-immobilized XDH and ADH make it possible to obtain higher xylonic acid concentration over broad ranges of pH (6-8) and temperature (15-35 °C) as compared to free enzymes, and retained over 60% of their initial activity after 20 days of storage. In addition, the half-life of the co-immobilized system was 4.5 times longer, and the inactivation constant (k_D = 0.0141 1/min) four times smaller, than those of the free biocatalysts (k_D = 0.0046 1/min). Furthermore, after five reaction cycles, immobilized XDH and ADH retained over 65% of their initial properties, with a final biocatalytic productivity of 1.65 mM of xylonic acid per 1 U of co-immobilized XDH. The results demonstrate the advantages of the use of co-immobilized enzymes over a free enzyme system in terms of enhanced activity and stability.