Chapter 7 - Enzyme-metal nanobiohybrids in chemobiocatalytic cascade processes

Abstract

In recent years, nanotechnology and biocatalysis have undergone awesome improvements, finally bringing a great revolution in different scientific areas. In this sense, working at the interface of materials engineering and biological sciences, the research branch of nanobiocatalys has emerged and demonstrated its wide application scope. As a representative example of the great potential of this multidisciplinary research area, novel enzyme-metal nanoparticles nanobiohybrids have been synthesized by integrating functional nanomaterials with enzyme biocatalysts. These advanced hybrid nanocomposites have shown novel and/or enhanced properties for both catalytic activities, and they have been successfully applied as powerful multicatalysts in different scientific areas such as biomedicine, biosensing, or cascade synthetic processes. The latter is an emerging technology in organic chemistry that introduces elegance and efficiency to multistep synthetic strategies. In this chapter, we will focus on the recent advances in the development of enzyme-metal hybrid catalysts for cascade processes. First, we will introduce representative examples of the synthetic strategies. Then, we will summarize and describe representative groups of metal nanoparticle-based hybrid catalysts, which are categorized based on the species of metal catalysts. Finally, representative applications of the enzyme-metal nanobiohybrids in cascade processes will be described.