The presence of heavy metals like manganese or cobalt should be avoid filtering the solution through a chelating ion exchange resin

like Chelex 100, in order to avoid paramagnetic effects. The author has no conflict of interest. This work was supported by EC FP7 DIVINOCELL Grant 223431 and FONDECYT Grant 1130711. Trichostatin A nmr “
“Biocatalysis is an important component of development of sustainable chemical processes (Schumacher et al., 2006 and Sell and Ulber, 2006). Jaeger (2004), in the early days of white biotechnology, talked about enzyme catalyzed processes replacing “fire and sword” chemistry which relies upon harsh conditions. Only few decades Staurosporine mouse back, Whitesides and Wong (1983) wrote an article about what enzymes can do and what they cannot do. Progress in biocatalysis almost makes one believe that there is no reaction for which an enzyme cannot be found or engineered. Recent reports show that the earlier notion that new enzyme activities are no longer evolving in nature may be wrong (Janssen et al., 2005). Techniques like directed evolution promise that given an application, an enzyme/biocatalyst

can be designed (Arnold and Georgiou, 2003a and Arnold and Georgiou, 2003b). Hence applied biocatalysis has definitely come of an age. Enzymes are used in various industrial sectors: food, textile, leather, biofuels, drugs and pharmaceuticals (Table 1). Also, these applications may involve the use of enzymes/biocatalyst

in so called nonconventional media: organic media (Gupta, 1992 and Vulfson et al., 2001) reverse micelles (Orlich and Schomäcker, 2002) and ionic liquids (Park and Kazlauskas, 2003 and Shah and Gupta, 2007a). Many enzyme preparations Selleckchem Tenofovir are commercially available in either free form or in immobilized form. These preparations are either sold in solid form or as solutions or suspensions. Often, for proprietary reasons, their constituents (other than the enzyme part) are not known to the user. Worse still, units are not properly defined or may differ from vendor to vendor or even from preparation to preparation offered by the same vendor. Hence, there is an urgent need for evolving norms for reporting data so that science can consist of reproducible data. This chapter attempts to identify some problems and challenges while describing quantitative results about a particular application of any enzyme. In many cases, “solutions” to the problems are easy provided all stake holders (scientists, enzyme vendors, industries and journals!) agree. In other cases, we need to search for the best possible solutions. Many issues discussed here are not restricted to industrial enzymology. However, industrial enzymology does involve some additional pitfalls.