Lipase catalysis in ionic liquids/supercritical carbon dioxide and its applications

Ionic liquids (ILs) and supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) have been accepted as solvents facilitating green processing by lots of scholars and researchers in recent decades. The combination of these two solvents owns advantages, such as improving the stability of the enzymes, less or no pollutants. Enzymatic catalysis has been thought as one of the potent methods to replace the chemical catalysis, which has some drawbacks, such as using chemical catalysts caused hard to recycle and to pollute the environment, because the enzymes are easy to be degraded. In the enzymes, lipases are important and potent in industrial application. Therefore, lipase catalysis in IL/SC-CO2 is green and benign to the environment. In this paper, advantages, mass transfer, characteristics and applications of lipase catalysis in IL/SC-CO2 are reviewed. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.