Biotransformation of L-phenylalanine (L-1a) and five unnatural substrates (rac-1b-f) by phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL) was investigated in a novel microfluidic device (Magne-Chip) that comprises microliter volume reaction cells filled with PAL-coated magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs). Experiments proved the excellent reproducibility of enzymecatalyzed biotransformation in the chip and the excellent reusability of the enzyme layer during 14 h continuous measurement (>98% over 7 repetitive measurements with L-1a). The platform also enabled fully automatic multiparameter measurements with a single biocatalyst loading of about 1 mg PAL-MNP. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations were used to study the flow field in the chambers and the effect of unintended bubble formation. Optimal flow rate for L-1a reaction and specific activities for rac-1b-f under these conditions were determined.

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In this paper the magnetic nanoparticle (MNP) dynamics in a microfluidic device is investigated in the presence of an external magnetic field. The nanoparticles are used for enzyme-substrate reaction measurements, where the enzyme is immobilized to the surface of the nanoparticles. During the measurements the microreactors, called microchambers are filled up with the MNPs where the distribution of the nanoparticles significantly influences the results of the further reaction measurements. In this paper the procedure of the nanoparticle aggregation is investigated numerically in the microchamber in a micro domain simulation space. First the acting forces on the MNPs are examined from the different phenomena. An in-house numerical model is presented where the dynamics of several MNPs are simulated in the micro-size domain. This model is also embedded in the open source CFD software OpenFOAM. The theoretical calculations and the simulations show that the particle-particle interaction due to magnetization plays an important role during the aggregation procedure. The particles in the magnetic field cluster over the time into chains, which phenomenon is in good agreement with the literature. A theoretical model of the chain dynamics is also established, which is compared to the simulation results. The presented micro domain model was later used to improve an Eulerian-Eulerian based two-phase CFD model and solver, which is able to model the complete MNP aggregation procedure in the magnetic field in macroscopic domains.

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