Biocatalyzed Vinyl Laurate Transesterification in Natural Deep Eutectic Solvents

Natural deep eutectic solvents (NADES) represent a green alternative to conventional organic solvents as reaction medium, offering more benign properties. To efficiently design NADES for biocatalysis, a better understanding of their effect on these reactions is needed. We hypothesize that this effect can be described by separately considering (1) the solvent interactions with the substrates, (2) the solvent viscosities and (3) the enzyme stability in NADES. We investigated the effect of substrate solvation and viscosity on the reaction rate; and the stability of the enzyme in NADES. To this end, we monitored the conversion over time of the transesterification of vinyl laurate with 1-butanol by the lipase enzyme Candida antarctica B in NADES of different compounds and molar ratios. The initial reaction rate is higher in most NADES (varying between 1.14 and 15.07 μ mol min^-1 mg^-1 ) than in the reference n-hexane (4.0 μ mol min^-1 mg^-1 )), but no clear relationship between viscosity and initial reaction rate was found. The increased reaction rate is most likely related to the solvation of the substrate due to a change in the activation energy of the reaction or a change in the conformation of the substrate. The enzyme retained part of its activity after the first 2 h of reaction (on average 20 μ mol min^-1 mg^-1 ), but this may also be due to slow dissolution of the substrate. The effect of viscosity seems to be marginal next to the effect of solvation and possible enzyme-NADES interaction. The enzyme retains some of its activity during the 24-hour measurements, but the enzyme incubation experiments did not yield accurate, comparable values.