Toward more sustainable enzyme reactions: enhancing kinetics by polydimethylacrylamide implementation

Enzymes, with their ability to accelerate reactions under mild conditions, have become invaluable tools in a wide range of applications and have revolutionized various industrial sectors. As industry strives for sustainability, optimizing enzymatic applications is a key factor in unlocking the full potential of enzymes. Considering that surfaces have a major impact on the behaviour of biological components, modifying surfaces in reaction systems enable the regulation of reaction conditions and can yield profound improvements. In this article, we investigate the effect of a one-step surface functionalization with polydimethylacrylamide on enzymatic reactions, aiming to enhance enzyme performance and prompt sustainability. Functionalized wells were used to assay substrate turnover and kinetic measurements of various enzymes and substrates. We observed increased substrate turnover and initial velocities for all enzymes and substrates. Our results show that the incorporation of PDMA in a reaction system can save up to two-thirds of the substrate and therefore hold significant implications for enzymology and biotechnological applications. Optimized enzymatic reactions can reduce resource consumption, waste production, time, and costs. In diagnostics, PDMA-enhanced assays might lead to earlier and more accurate disease detection, improving patient outcomes. Furthermore, as we were able to demonstrate the effect of PDMA surface functionalization for enzymes of different types, it can be assumed that the positive properties can also be used for other enzymes, assays and diverse industrial applications. PDMA surface functionalization via UV-crosslinking leads to increased substrate turnover and initial velocities, allowing more sustainable enzymatic reactions.