Preparation of functionalized nanostructures on microchannel surface and their use for enzyme microreactors [An article from: Chemical Engineering Journal]

This digital document is a journal article from Chemical Engineering Journal, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Microreactors have become a new and promising technology in chemistry, chemical engineering, and biotechnology fields. Nanostructures have attracted interest as a reaction apparatus especially for catalytic reaction. The present study develops a simple method for nanostructure preparation that is suitably functionalized for a pile-up enzyme microreaction system. First, we developed a simple method to prepare a nanostructure on a microchannel surface. We applied the sol-gel procedure, which has been utilized for porous structure preparation in batchwise systems. We immobilized the enzyme through amide-bond formation with the surface. The cucumisin-immobilized microreactor showed high efficiency that enable hydrolysis of substrate within 2s. This result demonstrates that the microreactor has sufficient performance to be capable of small quantity industrial scale processing. Next, we tried to develop a reversible immobilization method for proteins on a microchannel surface. This should solve the enzyme lifetime problem because we are thereby able to detach a denatured enzyme and replace it with a fresh one. We examined two methods, immobilization through disulfide bond and Ni-complex using His-tag. These methods might be useful for further development of highly efficient pile-up enzyme microreaction systems.