Flow‐Induced Microfluidic Assembly for Advanced Biocatalysis Materials

Abstract

Exploring the potential of microfluidic systems, this study presents a groundbreaking approach harnessing energy in microfluidic flows within a purpose‐built microreactor, enabling precise deposition of functional biomaterials. Upon optimizing reactor dimensions and integrating it into a microfluidic system, sequentially flow‐induced deposition of DNA hydrogels and transformation into DNA‐protein hybrid materials with SpyTag/SpyCatcher technology is investigated. However, limited functionalization rates restrict its viability for targeted biocatalytic processes. Therefore, the direct deposition of a phenolic acid decarboxylase is investigated, which is efficiently deposited but shows limited biocatalytic performance due to shear‐induced denaturation. This challenge is overcome by a two‐step immobilization process, resulting in microfluidic bioreactors demonstrating initial high space‐time yields of up to 7000 g L−1 d−1, but whose process stability proves unsatisfactory. However, by exploiting the principle of flow‐induced deposition to immobilize recombinant E. coli cells as functional living materials overexpressing biocatalytically relevant enzymes, bioreactors are produced that show equally high space‐time yields in continuous whole‐cell catalysis which remain constant over periods of up to 10 days. The insights gained offer optimization strategies for advanced functional materials and innovative reactor systems holding promise for applications in fundamental materials science, biosensing, and scalable production of microreactors for biocatalysis and bioremediation.

Continuous Fluid Catalytic Reactor Constructed Based on In Situ Growth of MOF Immobilized Enzyme on Ordered Silk Fabric

“…In addition, they can only be used in stirred reactions and not in continuous fluid catalytic reactions, resulting in low reaction efficiencies. ,− Therefore, the application of enzyme immobilization in continuous microfluidic reactors has aroused great interest. For example, wall-coated reactors and packed-bed reactors that can achieve continuous production and long-term reuse have been successfully developed, but they still have some limitations: low amount of fixed catalyst, high cost, cumbersome packaging operations, and low mass transfer efficiency. − Using monolithic materials may be a good choice.…”