Optical properties of sol-gel immobilized Laccase: a first step for its use in optical biosensing

Laccases are cuproproteins belonging to the group of oxidoreductases that are able to catalyze the oxidation of various aromatic compounds (particularly phenols) with the concomitant reduction of oxygen to water. They are characterized by low substrate specificity and have a catalytic competence which widely varies depending on the source. Additionally, laccases have also very peculiar optical properties due to their copper active sites which participate to the reduction processes. All these characteristics make laccases very flexible biotic element for biotechnological applications. During the years, a number of studies have been devoted at exploiting catalytic properties of laccases and very few at profiting of their optical properties. Some preliminary studies by absorption, fluorescence FT-IR and Raman spectroscopies of commercial laccases have evidenced their potential usefulness for optical biosensing of phenol compounds as cathecol. Moreover the sol-gel process offers a convenient and versatile method for preparing optically transparent matrices at room temperature that can represent a very convenient support for laccase immobilization. Also for immobilised enzymes the above-mentioned techniques have allowed a detailed characterization of their optical properties that confirmed the potentials of laccases in optical biosensors and represented a fundamental step in the designing of an optimised optical biosensing scheme.