Enzymes, substrates and ionic liquids as a triad for potential development of efficient industrial processes

Abstract

The present work is focused on technological solutions for enzymatic reactions in an industrial context with the support of ionic liquids in combination with organic solvents. Ionic liquids stand out for their unique physical-chemical properties that drive a large number of applications in different fields such as synthesis, catalysis, electrochemistry and nanotechnology. Their successful entrance in the enzymatic catalysis arena at the beginning of 2000, showed their potential as reaction medium. For several reactions the organic solvents were successfully replaced by pure ionic liquids generating higher yields and in some cases with proven increased enzymatic stability. This represents the starting point of the project that extended the usage of the ionic liquids for enzyme catalyzed reactions to biphasic systems, for possible new technological solutions, having SILP technologies as a model. The desired reaction takes place at the interface between an ionic liquid and an organic solvent as an immiscible mixture, being catalyzed by lipases, known to be active at the contact phase. The aim is to optimize the reaction system to favor the formation of the product mainly in the organic phase, in an attempt to avoid tedious separation steps, considered in many industrial processes as a bottle neck. The migration towards a particular phase is based on the partition of the compound of interest between the two corresponding solvents. Combination of several ionic liquids with organic solvents characterized by different polarities were set for analyzing the behavior of the substrates as well as for the products.