(751e) Design of Enzyme Electrodes for Sensing and Power Applications

The prospect of harnessing the catalytic functionality of enzymes for practical applications holds tremendous scientific and technological promise. Composed of folded proteins built around an active site, enzymes are biological catalysts that enable thousands of highly specific reactions to occur under mild conditions. In biological systems, electron exchange to and from enzymes happens diffusionally from small redox molecules.  In contrast, practical systems designed by humankind often rely on electron exchange at a heterogeneous interface (an electrode). By using mediator molecules to transport electrons to enzymes they can be used on electrodes with relatively high currents, but the resulting systems can be complex. Electron hopping, Michaelis-Menton kinetics, materials aspects of hydrogels, and other complications make enzyme electrode design less than intuitive. This talk aims to demonstrate the connection between electrode modeling, synthesis techniques, and fabrication, which when used together can greatly improve the practical performance of enzyme electrodes. An example case will be presented in which current response of an oxygen reducing enzyme electrode was doubled by molecular engineering.