Introduction

The area of immobilized cells and organelles has expanded very fast. Many new techniques for the preparation of immobilized cells have been developed during the last decade, especially during the last 5 years. Concomitantly with this availability of methods for obtaining suitable preparations, a rather broad spectrum of applications have been investigated. The preparations used have been based on cells with different metabolic and physical characteristics: cell fragments, organelles, cell homogenates, dead cells, permeabilized cells, resting cells, starving cells, viable cells, and mixed cell cultures. Most of the applications have utilized the immobilized cells as biocatalysts, but reports also exist on the use of immobilized cells as affinity adsorbents