Immobilized microfluidic enzymatic reactors

Abstract

The use of enzymes for cleavage, synthesis or chemical modification represents one of the most common processes used in biochemical and molecular biology laboratories. The continuing progress in medical research, genomics, proteomics, and related emerging biotechnology fields leads to exponential growth of the applications of enzymes and the development of modified or new enzymes with specific activities. Concurrently, new technologies are being developed to improve reaction rates and specificity or perform the reaction in a specific environment. Besides large-scale industrial applications, where typically a large processing capacity is required, there are other, much lower-scale applications, benefiting form the new developments in enzymology. One such technology is microfluidics with the potential to revolutionize analytical instrumentation for the analyses of very small sample amounts, single cells or even subcellular assemblies. This article aims at reviewing the current status of the development of the immobilized microfluidic enzymatic reactors (IMERs) technology.

Silica-immobilized enzyme reactors; application to cholinesterase-inhibition studies

“…This bioencapsulation strategy therefore provides an economical and rapid route for synthesizing IMER systems with a number of advantages including; minimal preparation time, high immobilization efficiency and excellent stability. IMERs could be designed to contain an enzyme for biocatalysis or organic synthesis, for rapid screening in medical diagnostics and therapy or for developing IMER columns for affinity chromatography [1,2,25]. In addition, coimmobilization of multienzyme systems is also possible.…”

“…Immobilized enzyme reactors (IMERs) have found application in catalysis and have also been used with a wide variety of receptor proteins for substrate interaction and inhibition studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. The main advantages of immobilized enzyme systems are stability and reusability.…”

Microfluidic enzymatic reactors for proteome research

“…Microfluidic devices can address the future analytical needs of increased throughput, lower sample and reagent consumption, smaller size, and lower operating costs [3]. It has been found that microfluidic-based enzymatic reactors can carry out protein digestion with high efficiency to facilitate subsequent reliable protein identification by peptide mass fingerprinting.…”

From a Review of Noble Metal versus Enzyme Catalysts for Glucose Oxidation Under Conventional Conditions Towards a Process Design Analysis for Continuous-flow Operation

“…Recent significant developments incorporate immobilization of enzymes on the surfaces of suitable carrier materials. Immobilization can be done by: covalent attachment to the activated support, • physical adsorption of the protein onto a solid matrix, and • copolymerisation of the protein with the polymers [64]. • Attaching enzymes to a microreactor wall is a limiting step for using enzymes in this type of microstructured reactors.…”