Development of Activity-based Cost Functions for Cellulase,Invertase, and Other Enzymes

摘要

As enzyme chemistry plays an increasingly important role in the chemicalindustry, cost analysis of these enzymes becomes a necessity. In this paper, we examine theaspects that affect the cost of enzymes based upon enzyme activity. The basis for this studystems from a previously developed objective function that quantifies the tradeoffs inenzyme purification via the foam fractionation process (Cherry et al., Braz J Chem Eng17:233-238, 2000). A generalized cost function is developed from our results that could beused to aid in both industrial and lab scale chemical processing. The generalized costfunction shows several nonobvious results that could lead to significant savings.Additionally, the parameters involved in the operation and scaling up of enzyme processingcould be optimized to minimize costs. We show that there are typically three regimes in theenzyme cost analysis function: the low activity prelinear region, the moderate activity linearregion, and high activity power-law region. The overall form of the cost analysis functionappears to robustly fit the power law form.