Immobilization of Enzyme Models and Analysis of Their Catalytic Products

Enzyme models are chemical compounds that can catalyze a large number of reactions by mimicking the active site of enzymes. Compared to enzymes, however, they have the advantage of being easier to produce and therefore more cost-effective, as well as being less sensitive to various reaction conditions.
To date, intensive basic research is been conducted in the field of enzyme models.The next step is to immobilize the enzyme models to improve the technical applicability of the systems. This will not only facilitate the separation of the reaction mixture but also improve or even make possible the reusability of the enzyme models. For immobilization, particularly various particles suitable for the process will be used. In addition, MOFs (metal-organic frameworks) can also serve as carrier materials. Here, it would be particularly interesting to build the porous structure directly from the enzyme model. This would result in numerous advantages: On one hand, a high catalyst density is expected since the carrier material and target molecule are identical. On the other hand, the regular and porous structure should allow effective mass transport of the reactants to the active centers, which should lead to high conversion rates of the overall system.

Besides immobilization, the effect of immobilization on the activity of the enzyme models is particularly important. Here, various catalysts will be functionalized differently and then examined for their activity against various substrates and under different reaction conditions.

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