Enzyme Catalysis in Ionic Liquids and Supercritical Carbon Dioxide

Enzymatic reactions based on ionic liquids (ILs) and supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO 2 ), are interesting alternatives to organic solvents for designing clean synthetic chemical processes that provide pure products directly. The classical advantages of scCO 2 to extract, dissolve and transport chemicals are tarnished in the case of enzymatic processes because of its denaturative effect on enzymes. ILs have shown themselves to be excellent non-aqueous environments for enzyme catalysis. Biphasic systems based on ILs and supercritical carbon dioxide have been proposed as the first approach to achieving integral green bioprocesses in non-aqueous media.