Immobilization and Stabilization of Acylase Via Nanobiocatalytic Approach for Enzymatic Antifouling

Acylase is a quorum quenching enzymes that disrupts bacterial cell-to-cell communication, and has attracted a great attention due to its great potential in antifouling. However, its short lifetime is one of the main problems against its successful antifouling application under a long-term operation. In this work, we developed stable and magnetically-separable nanobiocatalyst via the approach of nanoscale enzyme reactors (NERs) by adsorbing acylase into the magnetically-separable mesoporous silica and chemically crosslinking the adsorbed acylase molecules. When employed in the system of membrane filtration for advanced water treatment, NERs of acylase (NER-AC) efficiently alleviated the biofilm maturation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 on the membrane surface, thereby enhancing the filtration performance by preventing the biofouling of membrane. The unique antifouling feature of NER-AC has a great potential to be used for the treatment of wastewaters and in various other enzyme applications where the poor enzyme stability has hampered the practical uses of enzymes.