The lipase from Pseudomonas fluorescens (PFL) has been immobilized on octyl-agarose beads under 16 different conditions (varying pH, ionic strength, buffer, adding some additives) at two different loadings, 1 and 60 mg of enzyme/g of support with the objective of check if this can alter the biocatalyst features. The activity of the biocatalysts versus p-nitrophenyl butyrate and triacetin and their thermal stability were studied. The different immobilization conditions produced biocatalysts with very different features. Considering the extreme cases, using 1 mg/g preparations, PFL stability changed more than fourfolds, while their activities versus pNPB or triacetin varied a 50–60%. Curiously, PFL specific activity versus triacetin was higher using highly enzyme loaded biocatalysts than using lowly loaded biocatalysts (even by a twofold factor). Moreover, stability of the highly loaded preparations was higher than that of the lowly loaded preparations, in many instances even when using 5°C higher temperatures (e.g., immobilized in the presence of calcium, the highly loaded biocatalysts maintained after 24 h at 75°c a 85% of the initial activity, while the lowly loaded preparation maintained only 27% at 70°C). Using the highly loaded preparations, activity of the different biocatalysts versus pNPB varied almost 1.7-folds and versus triacetin 1.9-folds. In this instance, the changes in stability caused by the immobilization conditions were much more significant, some preparations were almost fully inactivated under conditions where the most stable one maintained more than 80% of the initial activity. Results suggested that immobilization conditions greatly affected the properties of the immobilized PFL, partially by individual molecule different conformation (observed using lowly loaded preparations) but much more relevantly using highly loaded preparations, very likely by altering some enzyme-enzyme intermolecular interactions. There is not an optimal biocatalyst considering all parameters. That way, preparation of biocatalysts using this support may be a powerful tool to tune enzyme features, if carefully controlled.

A new strategy to increase the enzyme-loading capacity of porous supports was investigated. Lipase from Pseudomonas fluorescens (PFL) was immobilized on octyl-agarose (OA) beads and treated with polyethyleneimine (PEI). Then, PFL was immobilized on the previous PFL layer. Next, the biocatalyst was coated with PEI and a third layer of PFL was added. Sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide electrophoresis showed that the amount of PFL proportionally increased with each enzyme layer; however, the effects on biocatalyst activity were not as clear. Hydrolyzing 50 mM of triacetin at 25 °C, the activity of the three-layer biocatalyst was even lower than that of the bi-layer one; on the contrary its activity was higher when the activity was measured at 4 °C in the presence of 30% acetonitrile (that reduced the activity and thus the relevance of the substrate diffusion limitations). That is, the advantage of the multilayer formation depends on the specific activity of the enzyme and on the diffusion limitations of the substrate. When octyl agarose (OA)-PFL-PEI-PFL preparation was treated with glutaraldehyde, the activity was reduced, although the enzyme stability increased and the immobilization of the last PFL layer offered results similar to the one obtained using the three-layer preparation without glutaraldehyde modification (90%).