Chemical activation of egg shell membrane for covalent immobilization of enzymes and its evaluation as inert support in urinary oxalate determination.

Egg shell membrane is a novel, robust, microporous, cost effective, easily available organic support material. In recent studies egg shell membranes were utilized as organic support for enzyme immobilization. But low conjugation yield limits its application as good support for biotechnological industries. In present study egg shell membrane was chemically treated to introduce free functional groups for covalent linkage of proteins to increase its conjugation yield and stability of conjugate complex. Many enzymes were tested for immobilization on modified egg shell membrane like oxalate oxidase, glucose oxidase, peroxidase and lipase. A fifteen to sixteen fold increase in conjugation yield was observed when immobilization was performed after chemical treatment in comparison to immobilization on native membrane with slight change in specific activity of immobilized enzyme which ranges from 5% to 15%. Egg shell membrane bound enzymes showed slight changes in their kinetic properties after immobilization. Egg shell membrane bound oxalate oxidase shows detection limit of 1.5 microM when used for urinary oxalate determination. Egg shell membrane support shows no interference to enzyme activity and a good correlation of 0.99 was observed with the values estimated using commercially available Sigma kit. The immobilized oxalate oxidase, glucose oxidase, peroxidase and lipase were stable up to duration of 180 days and there is respective loss of 10%, 13%, 24%, and 33% of initial activity. Overall result strengthens our view of using chemically modified egg shell membrane as solid support for better immobilization of enzymes and can be used in various biotechnological applications.