Study on the enhanced adsorption properties of lysozyme on polyacrylic acid modified TiO2 nano-adsorbents

Abstract

The adsorption and immobilization of enzymes onto solid carriers has been focused on due to their many advantages, such as improved stability against a thermal or organic solvent and a good cycle usability. TiO2 nanoparticles is one of excellent nano-adsorbents owing to its excellent biocompatibility, non-inflammatory, and abundant surface hydroxyl groups, which are convenient to be combined with various functional groups. In this paper polyacrylic acid (PAA) modified TiO2 nanoparticles were synthesized through an in situ light-induced polymerization of acrylic acid on the surface of TiO2 nanoparticles. The structure and surface physicochemical properties of the PAA/TiO2 nanoparticles were characterized by TEM, XRD, FT-IR, Zeta potential measurements and TG-DSC. The experimental results showed that the isoelectric point of PAA/TiO2 significantly reduced to 1.82 compared with that of pure TiO2 nanoparticles (6.08). In the adsorption tests of lysozyme (Lyz), the PAA/TiO2 nanoparticles displayed enhanced adsorption activity compared with pristine TiO2. The maximum adsorption capacity of PAA/TiO2 for Lyz was 225.9 mg g−1 under the optimum conditions where the initial concentration of Lyz was 300 mg ml−1, the addition amount of PAA/TiO2 was 6.4 mg, the adsorption time was 30 min and the pH value was 7.0. The sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS, 0.5%) presented the best efficiency (76.86%) in the removal of adsorbed Lyz, and the PAA/TiO2 nanoparticles showed excellent adsorption stability based on five cyclic adsorption–desorption tests. The fitting calculation results of the adsorption isotherm and the thermodynamics indicated the adsorption was an exothermic, entropy increasing, spontaneous and monomolecular layer adsorption process.