Immobilization of Lipases – A Review. Part I: Enzyme Immobilization

Free enzymes employed as biological catalysts have many advantages such as low reaction time, involving low energy and less waste output when compared to conventional chemical catalysts. However, commercial utilization of free enzymes is often hampered by the lack of operational stability, high cost, and non-reusability. Immobilization of enzyme is an option to overcome these obstacles. Immobilized enzyme expresses stable performance in organic solvents even in adverse pH, which makes the biomolecules reusable and prosperous as a biological catalyst. Biological catalysis with immobilized enzymes is found to be an alternative method instead of chemical catalysis for chemical reactions in the foreseeable future. Sources of lipase, techniques in immobilization and cross-linkers are dealt with in this paper.