Reviewing research on the synthesis of CALB-catalyzed sugar esters incorporating systematic mapping principles

Abstract

Rigorous evidence reviews must follow specific guidelines designed to improve transparency, reproducibility, and to minimize biases to which traditional reviews are susceptible. While evidence synthesis methods, such as systematic reviews and maps, have been used in several research fields, the majority of reviews published in the realm of chemical engineering are nonsystematic. In this study, we incorporated principles of systematic mapping to conduct a literature review covering research on the synthesis of sugar fatty acid esters (SFAE) with Candida antarctica lipase B (CALB). Our results showed that the simple monosaccharides were the most cited sugars among studies we conducted. The direct use of renewable raw materials and frequently available resources to produce alternative sugar esters (SE) was scarcely reported in our data set. We found that free fatty acids (FFA) were the most commonly cited acyl donors amongst all publications, with lauric, oleic, and palmitic acids accounting for ∼43% of the occurrences. Tertiary alcohols (ter-butyl alcohol (T-but) and 2-methyl-2-butanol (2M2B)) and ionic liquids were the most used solvents to synthesize SE. The co-occurence analysis of keywords involving solvent terms showed that most of the papers evaluated different solvents as reaction media (mostly in the form of a bisolvent system), also investigating the impact of their choice on sugar ester productivities. Given the potential of reviews informing us of research decisions, this article reveals trends and spaces across CALB-catalyzed SE synthesis research, in addition to introducing a new methodological perspective for developing reviews in the field of chemical engineering.

Keywords:

• Systematic mapping
• evidence synthesis
• sugar esters
• Candida antarctica lipase B
• co-occurence analysis of keywords
• lipase
• enzyme
• chemical engineering
• biochemical processes
• biotechnology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by: Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) [grant numbers 2019/23908-4, 2019/08533-4, and 2016/10636-8]; Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico – Brasil (CNPq) [grant number 308212/2017-7]; Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) [Finance Code 001].