Margot has presented her work on the one-step preparation of hybrid chemo-enzymatic heterogeneous catalysts, combining a zeolite and an oxidase. At the occasion of this even, organized by and for non-permanent scientists, Margot has presented the results which have been recently published in Nanoscale Advances. In this work, we show that it is possible to co-spray an enzyme with a suspension of zeolite nanocrystals and to obtain directly a bi-functional catalyst, where the enzyme performs the first part of a cascade reaction, and then the zeolite completes the process. The trick is to protect the enzyme against deactivation. This is done by wrapping it into a polyelectrolyte (to form so-called “enzyme-polyelectrolyte complexes“) prior to spray drying.
Well done Margot!