Flow‐Induced Microfluidic Assembly for Advanced Biocatalysis Materials

RESEARCH ARTICLE
www.afm-journal.de
Flow-Induced Microfluidic Assembly for Advanced
Biocatalysis Materials
Phillip Lemke, Leonie Schneider, Willfried Kunz, Anna L. Rieck, Paula S. Jäger,
Alexander Bruckmann, Britta Nestler, Kersten S. Rabe, and Christof M. Niemeyer*
Exploring the potential of microfluidic systems, this study presents a
groundbreaking approach harnessing energy in microfluidic flows within a
purpose-built microreactor, enabling precise deposition of functional
biomaterials. Upon optimizing reactor dimensions and integrating it into a
microfluidic system, sequentially flow-induced deposition of DNA hydrogels
and transformation into DNA-protein hybrid materials with
SpyTag/SpyCatcher technology is investigated. However, limited
functionalization rates restrict its viability for targeted biocatalytic processes.
Therefore, the direct deposition of a phenolic acid decarboxylase is
investigated, which is efficiently deposited but shows limited biocatalytic
performance due to shear-induced denaturation. This challenge is overcome
by a two-step immobilization process, resulting in microfluidic bioreactors
demonstrating initial high space-time yields of up to 7000 g L$^{−1}$ d$^{−1}$ , but
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whose process stability proves unsatisfactory. However, by exploiting the
principle of flow-induced deposition to immobilize recombinant E. coli cells as
functional living materials overexpressing biocatalytically relevant enzymes,
bioreactors are produced that show equally high space-time yields in
continuous whole-cell catalysis which remain constant over periods of up to
10 days. The insights gained offer optimization strategies for advanced
functional materials and innovative reactor systems holding promise for
applications in fundamental materials science, biosensing, and scalable
production of microreactors for biocatalysis and bioremediation.