Fabrication of Activity-Reporting Glucose Oxidase Nanocapsules with Oxygen-Independent Fluorescence Variation

Glucose oxidase (GOx) has seen large-scale technological applications, and the determinations of its activity that is directly related to the enzymatic functions are extremely important. However, conventional methods to analyze the enzymatic activity involving high oxygen dependency and indirect redox reactions are usually tedious and restricted in complicated environments. For analyzing enzymatic activity by direct detection of the electron signals from the active centers, mediators are often used for facilitating the electron transfer. Differing from common methods of preparing electron mediators-contained GOx composites, a strategy aiming at remolding of the enzyme itself has been proposed in this work. Cofactor-like molecule 2'-diallyamino-ethyl flavin (DAA-flavin) derived from riboflavin is synthesized and incorporated as cross-linker into the polyacrylamide (PAAm) network around GOx surface by in situ polymerization to obtain enzyme nanocapsules termed as GOx@Fla-c-PAAm. The peripheral polymer shell confines the orientation of GOx and prevents it from denaturing, whereas incorporated DAA-flavin can replace the oxygen as an alternative electron acceptor to interact with the active centers of GOx in the presence of the substrate, thus giving the nanocapsules oxygen-independent characteristics. The introduced unlimited cofactor-like molecules endow the nanocapsules redox-related fluorescence, and the intensity variation is closely correlated with the enzymatic activity. There is a high goodness of fitting (R-2 similar to 0.990) between the slope of linear fluorescence time plots and enzymatic activity, thereby making the nanocapsules a reliable activity-reporting enzymatic nanosystem with oxygen-independent fluorescence variation for further extended potential application in biofuel cells and biosensors.