Bioengineered Polyhydroxyalkanoates as Immobilized Enzyme Scaffolds for Industrial Applications.

Enzymes function as biocatalysts and are extensively exploited in industrial applications. Immobilization of enzymes using support materials has been shown to improve enzyme properties, including stability and functionality in extreme conditions and recyclability in biocatalytic processing. This review focuses on the recent advances utilizing the design space of self-assembled polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) particles as biocatalyst immobilization scaffolds. Self-assembly of biologically active enzyme-coated PHA particles is a one-step production process, which avoids the costly and laborious chemical cross-linking of purified enzymes to separately produced support materials. The homogeneous orientation of enzymes densely coating PHA particles enhances the accessibility of catalytic sites, improving enzyme function. The PHA particle technology has been developed into a remarkable scaffolding platform for the design of cost-effective designer biocatalysts amenable toward robust industrial bioprocessing. In this review, the PHA particle technology will be compared to other biological supramolecular assembly-based technologies suitable for enzyme immobilization. Recent progress in the fabrication of biological particulate scaffolds using enzymes of industrial interest will be summarized. Additionally, we outline innovative approaches to overcome limitations of assembled PHA particles to enable fine-tuned immobilization of multiple enzymes to enhance performance in multi-step cascade reactions, such as those used in continuous flow bioprocessing.