New insights on enzyme stabilization for industrial biocatalysis

Abstract

Due to their versatility and ability to provide tunable chemo-, regio-, and enantio-selectivitites, enzyme-mediated transformations offer an effective and eco-friendly alternative to the traditional multistep chemical synthesis methods, which often require organic solvents, hazardous reagents, and tedious purification processes. While enzymes provide high catalytic and specific activity at mild conditions, several operational drawbacks hamper the application of enzymes as industrial biocatalysts. These include poor performance when confronting non-natural substrates, inhibition by certain components in the reaction media, short lifetime, lack of reusability, and recovery postreaction. Among these, achieving enzyme stabilization is most challenging from a practical standpoint.