Paper accepted – Enzymes on Membranes

“Miniaturized Systems for Evaluating Enzyme Activity in Polymeric Membrane Bioreactors” is accepted for publication in Engineering in Life Sciences. Congratulations Shaf! The paper describes a small-scale platform for evaluating the activity of a laccase enzyme (top left) on membranes in a flow-through format (top right) using spectroscopy to detect a color change when the surface-bound enzyme oxidizes a flowing reactant. Enzymes can convert reactants into useful chemical products, and if they’re attached to a membrane, they can carry out the conversion continuously on flowing reactants. The graphs above show that a flushing step is needed to knock off loosely-bound enzyme for repeatable results in the product concentration (y-axis) as a function of reactant flow rate. In this work, we set out to make a system that works with small quantities of enzymes produced in lab experiments so our collaborators in biology can sort through enzyme variants more quickly.