Support engineering: relation between development of new supports for immobilization of lipases and their applications

The growing interest in processes with the use of immobilized lipases guides to the development of new supports. In that way, the design and characterization of new supports for lipase immobilization have been increasingly popular in literature. Efforts to obtain “the perfect support” (a not accomplished yet) are described in this paper. Obviously, the choice and development of a support is directly related to the process in which it will be used, considering different factors as the media where the immobilzed enzyme will be used (whether aqueous, free or with solvents), potency of agitation, reactor configuration or substrates/products that will be involved. The present work discusses the use of some techniques of support synthesis in the case of core-shell particles, such as: miniemulsion, microemulsion, suspension, dispersion, the use of heterofunctional supports, whole-cell and processes of coimobilization. Some analytical tools for the investigation of enzyme immobilization are also presented, such as fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, as well as support characteristics that may be relevant for its final performance (e.g., specific surface area, particle diameter and particle size distribution and confocal laser scanning microscope).