A Workshop on “Enzyme Technology”

A Workshop on “Enzyme Technology” was organized for the students of M.Sc. first semester students of Department of Biotechnology, Patna Women’s College.

The study of enzymes and their uses in technological production of products is called enzyme technology. Enzyme is a substance that acts a catalyst in living organism, regulating the rate at which chemical reactions proceed without itself being altered in the process. All the metabolic reactions in any living system have products as well as by products. Some enzymes are used to catalyze or speed up the reaction to obtain a product which will give us energy and some are used to destroy the by products of those reactions which should be removed from body or else they will cause damage to our cell.

One such enzyme is “catalase” which was studied during this workshop. How catalase help any living system to detoxify the effect of hydrogen peroxide (byproduct of various metabolism) which might create free radicals? Free radicals are harmful for the cell and may lead to many chronic diseases like cancer, aging etc.
This workshop also sensitized our students with the techniques of cell and enzyme immobilization which has industrial importance in the field of biotechnology for the production of various industrially important products like alcohol, weak acids etc.

A series of experiments performed by the students were as follows
i) Isolation of acid phosphatase enzyme from Potato and estimation of enzyme activity
ii) Isolation of crude catalase enzyme from Banana and analyze the effect of various parameters, pH, Temperature, salt concentration and substrate concentration on enzyme activity.
iii) Whole cell (Yeast) and enzyme (acid phosphatase) immobilization by membrane entrapment method.