Sonochemical Effect on Activity and Conformation of Commercial Lipases

The enzyme under lower-intensity ultrasonic irradiation leads to favourable conformational changes, thereby enhancing its activity. The augmentation of activity of ultrasound-treated enzyme is strongly dependent on ultrasound intensity, duty cycle and exposure time, which was investigated for commercial lipases. Thermomyces lanuginosus (TL) lipase showed a 1.3-fold enhanced activity after irradiating at 22 kHz and 11.38 W cm^?2 with 50 % duty cycle for 25-min ultrasonic treatment and 1.5-fold enhanced activity was observed for lipozyme (candida antarctica lipase B (CALB)) lipase, at 22 kHz and 15.48 W cm^?2 with 66.67 % duty cycle for 20-min ultrasonic treatment. After sonication, thermodynamic parameters viz. E _a, ΔH, ΔS and ΔG were evaluated and values were found to be significantly lower for both lipases. In addition, the changes in secondary structure due to sonication were investigated by using Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR), which revealed increase in a certain number of random coiled structure, loss of β-sheets, β-turns and α-helix content in TL lipase and CALB lipase. Also, fluorescence spectroscopy exhibited the increased number of tryptophan on surface of both lipases. Moreover, particle size distribution after sonication also helped to improve surface area and enhanced mass transfer, which contributed to improvement in lipase activity.