A facile pretreatment method for efficient immobilization of penicillin G acylase

A facile pretreatment method was developed to obtain high specific activity of PGA from recombinant E. coli cells for preparing immobilized enzyme with high activity, which coupled selective extraction of PGA with butyl acetate and adsorption of butyl acetate with active carbon. Butyl acetate (5%, v/v) led to a 92.0% release of PGA, the specific activity of which in the extracting solution was twice that obtained by sonication. The negative effect on PGA immobilization due to residual butyl acetate in the extracting solution was removed by adding active carbon (8%, w/v). The final PGA solution meets requirement for industrial immobilization while eliminating the high cost of a traditional purification process. This pretreatment method developed in this work is simple, highly performing and cost-effective. It has been employed in a 10 tons/year immobilized PGA production line.