
Biocatalysis is evolving toward more efficient, sustainable, and intensified processes capable of meeting the demands of modern chemical, pharmaceutical, food, and biotechnological industries. This collection focuses on emerging strategies that overcome traditional limitations of enzymatic processes by integrating advanced biocatalyst engineering, sustainable reaction environments, and innovative reactor technologies.
Enzyme immobilization plays a central role in this transition by improving biocatalyst performance, facilitating enzyme recovery and reuse, and enabling long-term operation in continuous reactors. Novel carriers, functionalized materials, carrier-free systems, and innovative immobilization methodologies are expanding the possibilities for designing highly active and robust heterogeneous biocatalysts.
At the same time, reaction-medium engineering offers opportunities to reduce the environmental footprint of biocatalytic transformations. Bio-based solvents, deep eutectic solvents (DES/NADES), aqueous-organic systems, and process sustainability.
Continuous-flow biocatalysis further contributes to process intensification by improving mass and heat transfer, productivity, operational stability, and process control while facilitating scale-up and integration with downstream operations. Packed-bed reactors, microreactors, membrane reactors, and multienzymatic or chemoenzymatic flow cascades represent particularly promising platforms.
The integration of enzyme immobilization, green reaction media, and continuous-flow technologies provides a powerful framework for developing scalable, resource-efficient, and sustainable biocatalytic processes, bridging fundamental biocatalysis with industrial implementation.