Chapter 23 - Biological macromolecules for enzyme immobilization

Abstract

For the previous few years, naturally occurring biopolymers have extensively been studied for their potential applications in the field of enzyme immobilization. As these naturally occurring polymers exhibit many profound properties with huge diversity, like flexibility, biocompatibility, renewability, nontoxicity, biodegradability, ecofriendly nature, and the presence of more than one reactive site, their demand in enzyme immobilization sector is drastically increased. These immobilization approaches allow the use of engineered enzyme in a variety of different applications that is, biofuels, biomedical, pharmaceutical, food, and environmental sectors. Immobilized enzymes have shown to exhibit improved stability, thermal resistivity, storage stability, and improved catalytic activity than the native forms of enzyme. This chapter provides a broad overview of the properties and the applications of various naturally occurring biopolymers that is, chitosan, chitin, agarose, alginates, cellulose, gelatin, dextran, carrageenan, pectin, and xanthan for their applications in enzyme immobilization with recent literature studies indicating biopolymer-based support material development and their utilization to make biocatalysts with desired stability and catalytic functionalities.