Glucose Oxidase Kinetics using MnO2 Nanosheets: Confirming Michaelis – Menten Kinetics and Quantifying Decreasing Enzyme Performance with Increasing Buffer Concentration

MnO2 nanosheets and ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) absorbance spectroscopy are used to study glucose oxidase (GOx) kinetics. Glucose oxidation by GOx produces H2O2, which rapidly decomposes the nanosheets and reduces their absorption. This direct approach for monitoring glucose oxidation enables simpler, real time kinetics analysis compared to methods that employ additional enzymes. Using this approach, the present study confirms that GOx kinetics is consistent with the Michaelis–Menten (MM) model, and reveals that the MM constant increases by an order of magnitude with increasing buffer concentration. Since larger MM constants imply higher enzyme substrate concentrations are required to achieve the same rate of product formation, increasing MM constants imply decreasing enzyme performance. These results demonstrate the facility of using MnO2 nanosheets to study GOx kinetics and, given the widespread applications of enzymes with buffers, the important sensitivity of enzyme–buffer systems on buffer concentration.