A Self-Assembling Protein Hydrogel Technology for Enzyme Incorporation onto Electrodes in Biofuel Cells

Abstract

Abstract : The proposed research aims to develop a novel protein hydrogel technology for high-density, high-activity enzyme immobilization on electrodes in enzymatic biofuel cells. Enzymatic biofuel cells hold great potential for providing flexible, compact energy to devices such as remote sensors and future miniature unmanned vehicles. However, current enzymatic biofuel cells suffer from low power densities (due to low enzyme concentrations) and short life-spans (due to low enzyme stability in vitro). These limitations derive largely from less-than-ideal techniques for immobilizing enzymes on electrodes. We propose to address these limitations by developing a new, highly stable self-assembling protein hydrogel platform for high-density enzyme immobilization on electrodes. The key features of the proposed protein hydrogel are: (1) conditional assembly of a highly stable protein hydrogel in response to the mixing of two soluble protein block copolymers, each functionalized by one fragment of a split intein, and (2) incorporation of ???docking station peptides??? into the self-assembling protein copolymers which serve as anchors for high-affinity immobilization of enzymes end-fused to docking protein tags.