A facile technique to prepare cross-linked enzyme aggregates using p-benzoquinone as cross-linking agent

Abstract

To obtain robust and thermo-stable enzyme aggregates, p-benzoquinone was used as cross-linker and bovine serum albumin (BSA) as crowding macromolecules to prepare cross-linked enzyme aggregates (CLEAs) of lipase. Effects of cross-linking time and cross-linker content on the activity, thermal stability and characteristics of enzyme aggregates were examined carefully. It was observed that when the content of p-benzoquinone was 5 mM and amount of BSA was 125% of that of lipase (w/w), the specific activity of cross-linked co-aggregates of lipase and BSA was 79.8 U mg−1, 2.44-fold of that of cross-linked enzyme aggregates of lipase without BSA. Moreover, after heat treatment for 96 h at 50 °C, the CLEAs prepared with this facile routine kept 75.18% of their initial activity, 5.01-fold more than that of the just CLEAs using glutaraldehyde. Furthermore, BSA macromolecules in lipase CLEAs enhanced the catalytic efficiency of free and just lipase CLEAs without BSA by 1.45 and 2.83 times, respectively. The proposed crosslinking technique would rank among the potential strategies for efficiently preparing robust and thermo-stable enzyme aggregates.