Effect of temperature towards immobilised tyrosinase enzyme on magnetic chitosan: article

Bisphenol A (BPA), a compound that is traceable in wastewater and packaging material can bring detrimental effect to human health when it is consumed. BPA has been linked to particular diseases related to endocrine system, such as breast cancer among women and defective reproductive system among men. In this modernised world, there is limitation of method to detect the presence of the compound in the environment as the available techniques are usually expensive, cannot be conducted in-situ, and require experienced technicians to operate effectively. In this study, the tyrosinase enzyme is employed to identify the presence of the BPA compound and to degrade the BPA into its monomer because the method of preparation is simple and relatively cheap compared to other existing techniques used to identify the presence of BPA in a solution. In this research, only effect of temperature is studied towards the ability of the enzyme to degrade the phenolic compound. The tyrosinase enzyme is immobilised onto magnetic chitosan via simple crosslinking process with the aid of glutaraldehyde as the crosslinking medium. Other parameters that influence the enzyme behaviour, like pH, hydrophobicity and electrostatic interactions, are not investigated due to time constraints and lack of necessary equipment and assumed to be similar from one set of experiment to another by maintaining stirring rate, amount of chemicals used in preparation steps. Based on the results obtained, the tyrosinase managed to degrade highest amount of BPA at temperature, T = 20 °C.