About the Seminar: 

Enzymes have been integrated into electrodes to form biosensors for nearly a century. To this date little work has been done to study whether the orientation of the enzyme at the electrode surface has a significant effect on the enzymes ability to catalyze a reaction. For Direct Electron Transfer (DET) and catalysis to occur the electrons and enzyme substrates must be mobile. Electrons must shuttle intra and intermolecularly with respect to the enzyme and in addition the substrates must readily travel in and out of the active site(s). In order to probe this, a library of laccase enzymes mutated to be linked to a gold electrode with different orientation with respect to the planar electrode. Laccases’ multiple active sites and substrate promiscuity makes it an ideal test candidate to probe for nuance surrounding DET and any steric hinderance affecting complete catalysis within bioelectrodes and biosensors.