Immobilization of urease enzyme on nanochitosan preparation and characterization for a promising bioapplication

Chitosan is a naturally occurring biopolymer of reactive amino and hydroxyl functional groups in its structure. Due to the exceptional physiochemical and biological properties of chitosan, including biocompatibility, bioactivity, non-toxic and immune system stimulator, it showed a potential of a wide spectrum of applications, such as magnetic-field assisted drug delivery, enzyme immobilization and many other industrial applications. Nanotechnology has sparked a lot of interest in the field of immobilized enzyme carrier preparation over the last decade. The aim of the immobilization process is to improve an enzyme's operational efficiency in industrial applications.. Herein, we show a new trend of enzyme immobilization that has not been studied before using urease enzyme, which is naturally hydrolyzed urea into ammonia and bicarbonate, and nanochitosan as a support platform. We proposed to explore the immobilization efficiency of urease on nanochitsan by ionic gelation method that help to improve the enzymatic reaction efficiency, for developing the enzyme-like decorate. The immobilized enzyme-nanochitosan was well characterized using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and Atomic force microscopy (AFM). Results of FTIR indicated that urease was successfully immobilized on chitosan. AFM result of immobilized urease showed preparation of nano particles have smaller dimensions and regular shape than the original nanochitosan. The catalytic activity of the immobilized enzyme was compared with that of free enzyme extracted from jack been. Results showed that high percentage of immobilization (135%) increased the catalytic activity of urease ∼3 folds more than the original urease activity. By immobilization of urease on nanoparticles of chitosan, it is easy to control the enzymatic reaction, develop the enzyme-like decorate and lower the cost of enzyme.