Issue 39, 2023

Multicompartment calcium alginate microreactors to reduce substrate inhibition in enzyme cascade reactions

Abstract

The formation of macromolecularly enriched condensates through associative or segregative liquid–liquid phase separation phenomena is known to play a central role in controlling various cellular functions in nature. The potential to spatially and temporally modulate multistep chemical reactions and pathways has inspired the use of phase-separated systems for the development of various synthetic colloidal micro- and nanoreactor systems. Here, we report a rational and synthetically minimal design strategy to emulate intended spatiotemporal functions in morphologically intricate and structurally defined calcium alginate hydrogel microreactors possessing multicompartmentalized internal architectures. Specifically, we implement a thermal phase separation protocol to achieve fine-control over liquid–liquid phase separation inside complex aqueous emulsion droplet templates that are loaded with hydrophilic polymer mixtures. Subsequent gelation of alginate-containing droplet templates using a novel freeze–thaw approach that can be applied to both scalable batch production or more precise microfluidic methods yields particle replicas, in which subcompartmentalized architectures can be retained. Larger active components can be enriched in the internal compartments due to their preferential solubility, and we show that selective sequestration of enzymes serves to create desired microenvironments to control and tune the reaction kinetics of a multistep enzyme cascade by reducing their mutual interference. This demonstration of mitigating substrate inhibition that is based primarily on optimizing the multicompartmentalized hydrogel particle morphology offers new opportunities for the simple and synthetically-minimal batch generation of hydrogel-based synthesis microreactors.

Graphical abstract: Multicompartment calcium alginate microreactors to reduce substrate inhibition in enzyme cascade reactions

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
22 Jun 2023
Accepted
14 Sep 2023
First published
14 Sep 2023
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Soft Matter, 2023,19, 7541-7549

Multicompartment calcium alginate microreactors to reduce substrate inhibition in enzyme cascade reactions

Y. Xi, B. D. Frank, A. Tatas, M. Pavlovic and L. Zeininger, Soft Matter, 2023, 19, 7541 DOI: 10.1039/D3SM00816A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications without requesting further permissions from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given.

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