Abstract
A major challenge in the industrial use of enzymes is maintaining their stability at elevated temperatures and in harsh organic solvents. In order to address this issue, we investigated the use of nanotubes as a support material for the immobilization and stabilization of enzymes in this work. SnO2 hollow nanotubes with a high surface area were synthesized by electrospinning the SnCl2 precursor and polyvinylpyrrolidone (dissolved in dimethyl formamide and ethanol). The electrospun product was used for the covalent immobilization of enzymes such as lipase, horseradish peroxidase, and glucose oxidase. The use of SnO2 hollow nanotubes as a support was promising for all immobilized enzymes, with lipase having the highest protein loading value of 217 mg/g, immobilization yield of 93%, and immobilization efficiency of 89%. The immobilized enzymes were fully characterized by various analytical methods. The covalently bonded lipase showed a half-life value of 4.5 h at 70 °C and retained ~91% of its original activity even after 10 repetitive cycles of use. Thus, the SnO2 hollow nanotubes with their high surface area are promising as a support material for the immobilization of enzymes, leading to improved thermal stability and a higher residual activity of the immobilized enzyme under harsh solvent conditions, as compared to the free enzyme.
Highlights
A major challenge in the industrial use of enzymes is maintaining their stability at elevated temperatures and in harsh organic solvents
The tubular structures could be inferred from the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images (Fig. 2a and c), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) (Fig. 2e) and the back-scattering mode of SEM were used to confirm the inner vacancy of the structures (Supplementary Fig. 1)
SnO2 hollow nanotubes with a high surface area were prepared by the electrospinning method
Summary
Synthesis and characterization of the SnO2 hollow nanotubes. The product was dried in an oven and subjected to thermal annealing in air. This calcination process resulted in the successful fabrication of SnO2 hollow nanotubes of length ranging from a few hundred nanometers to a few micrometers and diameter in the range of 200–300 nm. The SnO2 hollow nanotubes were composed of clusters of tens of nanometer-sized nanoparticles (Fig. 2). The tubular shape instead of a rod-like form indicated that the structure consisted of SnO2 nanoparticles, which were ~40–50 nm in size (Fig. 2e). The size of the SnO2 nanoparticles was calculated from the strongest peak (110) using Scherrer’s equation and found to be 43.18 nm, which matched the size evaluated from the SEM
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