Enzymatic glycosylation is a versatile and sustainable biotechnological approach that plays a pivotal role in the production of bioactive compounds. This process involves the enzymatic transfer of sugar moieties onto various acceptor molecules, such as small molecules, peptides, or proteins, resulting in the synthesis of glycosides. These glycosides often exhibit enhanced bioactivity, improved solubility, and enhanced stability, making them valuable in pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, and the food industry. This review explores the diverse enzymatic glycosylation strategies employed in the synthesis of bioactive compounds. It highlights the enzymatic catalysts involved, including glycosyltransferases, glycosidases, glycophosphorylases, and glycosynthases. It considers the advantages and disadvantages of these biocatalysts in the stereoselective and regioselective synthesis of different types of glycosylated molecules, phenolic and aliphatic alcohols, oligosaccharides, polysaccharides, glycoderivatives, glycopeptides, and glycoproteins with a clear focus on food and pharmaceutical chemistry. Furthermore, the review outlines various sources of sugar donors, activated glycosides, and sugar nucleotides, as well as the utilization of engineered enzymes and microorganisms for glycosylation reactions. The advantages of enzymatic glycosylation, including its high regioselectivity, stereoselectivity, and sustainability, are emphasized. Therefore, these approaches combining the use of different catalytic systems, the improvement of tools such as immobilization technology or chemical or genetic modification to improve the glycosylation process, could be useful tools in continuous biotechnological advancements.

In this study, unmodified, amino modified and cyanuric chloride functionalized amino modified nonporous fumed nano-silica particles (FNS, AFNS and CCAFNS, respectively) were used for the development of efficient nanobiocatalysts for application in the biosynthesis of bioactive galactosides, galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS). Hence, in an attempt to elucidate the mechanism of immobilization, based on available enzyme conformation, the effects of immobilization parameters (initial enzyme concentration, immobilization time and pH) were analyzed. Among all three used nano-sized supports, the one with amino groups (AFNS) exhibited the best β-galactosidase binding capacity of 220 mg g⁻¹ support with the efficiency of ∼90% at pH 4.5 and immobilization time 3 h. The highest hydrolytic activity of ∼2200 IU g⁻¹ was achieved, which is far higher than previously reported. Meanwhile, β-galactosidases covalently immobilized on CCAFNS and adsorbed on FNS nanoparticles were found to have similar trends with respect to immobilization efficiency (58–71%) and hydrolytic activity (∼600 IU g⁻¹). Furthermore, thermal stability at 60 °C was increased by β-galactosidases immobilized on AFNS and CCAFNS (4 and 1.4-fold, respectively) due to the protective effect of interactions formed between enzyme molecules and the surfaces of nanoparticles. Since β-galactosidase immobilized on AFNS was the nanobiocatalyst with the highest activity and stability, it was applied in GOS production. With AFNS–β-galactosidase GOS production of 90 g L⁻¹ h⁻¹ was achieved as compared to 30 g L⁻¹ h⁻¹ by free β-galactosidase, meaning that AFNS enhanced the selectivity of β-galactosidase for transgalactosylation, which is a crucial advantage for its application in GOS production.

The esterification is well-established type of reaction in organic synthesis used for manufacturing various valuable esters used prevalently as ingredients of food, skincare products, pharmaceuticals and fuels. In recent decades biocatalytic synthetic routes based on using enzymes as catalysts have received a lot of attention in scientific researches and industry. Main advantages of enzymatic esterifications are high selectivity (regioselectivity and enantioselectivity), performing reaction at milder conditions (moderate temperature and atmospheric pressure) and the fact that enzymatically synthesized product gain label of natural product, which increases its market appeal. The purpose of this review is to point out the most important advances in lipase-catalyzed ester synthesis in nonconventional reaction media, with special focus on several most important types of ester. This part of review starts with outcomes in synthesis of aroma esters, usually obtained using monofunctional aliphatic alcohols and acids, which have been investigated for decades and industrial processes are already established. However, later sections are dedicated to enzymatic esterification of more complex molecules (carbohydrates, vitamin C, flavonoids) having more than one functional groups, which are subject of numerous studies in recent times because in these reactions regioselectivity of biocatalysts can be fully explored and processes are still subject of optimization, especially with respect to selection of reaction media and media engineering.