Immobilization of laccase on chitosan–halloysite hybrid porous microspheres for phenols removal

Abstract

In this paper, we used natural resources of halloysite nanotubes and chitosan to prepare new porous organic/inorganic hybrid microspheres with diameter of about 100–150 μm by reversed-phase suspension cross-linking technique. The SEM image revealed that halloysite nanotubes overlapped together within hybrid microspheres and formed a hybrid porous structure. We demonstrated that the resulted porous microspheres could be used as a new kind of support to immobilize laccase, which showed excellent loading capacity for laccase immobilization as high as 123.1 mg/g. The stability of laccase was also greatly improved after immobilization on the support. While the immobilized laccase was used as biocatalyst to remove phenols from wastewater, the removal efficiency could reach as high as 95.0%.

Keywords:

• Halloysite nanotube
• Chitosan
• Hybrid microsphere
• Immobilized laccase
• Phenol removal

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21271158 and 20871105).