Activity and Stability Studies for Enzyme-Nanomaterial Conjugates

Recent advances in nanomaterials synthesis and engineering have made an impact on a number of fields. For instance, in nanoelectronics, single walled carbon nanotubes have been used as thin-film semiconductor for miniaturized transistors (Kang 2007), while in photonics, biology or medicine carbon nanotubes have been investigated as highly specific biomolecule detectors (Chen 2003; Kempa 2003; Liu 2009). Other nanomaterials, such as titanium dioxide, had shown a strong ability to decompose water into oxygen and hydrogen and were used for cancer treatments (Kubota 1994). By interfacing nanomaterials with biological molecules novel applications have emerged ranging from diagnostics, to drug delivery and biosensors (Jain 2007; Bianco 2005; Scuhmann 2000). For these applications, various methods were used to prepare biological molecule-nanomaterial conjugates including physical immobilization (Bake 2010) or covalent binding (Arica 1995). However, few of these studies have described how the nanomaterial influences the structure and function of the protein with which it is interfaced