Document Type
Article
Version Deposited
Published Version
Publication Date
12-1-2019
Publication Title
Scientific Reports
DOI
10.1038/s41598-019-42769-8
Abstract
Although enzymes are efficient catalysts capable of converting various substrates into desired products with high specificity under mild conditions, their effectiveness as catalysts is substantially reduced when substrates are poorly water-soluble. In this study, to expedite the enzymatic conversion of a hydrophobic substrate, we use a bicontinuous interfacially jammed emulsion gel (bijel) which provides large interfacial area between two immiscible liquids: oil and water. Using lipase-catalyzed hydrolysis of tributyrin as a model reaction in a batch mode, we show that bijels can be used as media to enable enzymatic reaction. The bijel system gives a four-fold increase in the initial reaction rate in comparison to a stirred biphasic medium. Our results demonstrate that bijels are powerful biphasic reaction media to accelerate enzymatic reactions with various hydrophobic reagents. This work also demonstrates that bijels can potentially be used as reaction media to enable continuous reactive separations.
Recommended Citation
Cha, S., Lim, H.G., Haase, M.F. et al. Bicontinuous Interfacially Jammed Emulsion Gels (bijels) as Media for Enabling Enzymatic Reactive Separation of a Highly Water Insoluble Substrate. Sci Rep 9, 6363 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41598-019-42769-8
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Comments
Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.