pure lipase. In literature a variety of carriers, e.g., acrylic resin, textile membrane, polypropylene, celite, mesoporous silica, and diatomaceous earth, have been employed for the lipase immobilization by physical adsorption technique 18). Silica-based porous material, because of their high surface area and tunable pore diameter, also gained popularity in recent past 23) as support for the immobilization of large molecules viz., enzymes. In continuation to our earlier efforts 10, 11, 22) , in present study Candida rugosa lipase (CRL) has been immobilized on MCM-41 by physical adsorption method, and resulted solid biocatalyst (CRL-MCM-41) has been employed for the transesterification of cotton seed oil with methanol. 2 Materials and methods 2.1 Enzyme solutions and instrumentations The solutions of CRL (Sigma-Aldrich) of 3.4 mg/ml concentration were prepared by shaking 68 mg of enzyme in 20 mL buffer solution (25 mM) of desired pH (3-10) at 25℃. Acetate, phosphate and tris/HCl were used for making the buffer solutions of pH 3-5, 6-8, and 9-10, respectively. The CRL solutions thus obtained were centrifuged and clear supernatant was collected and stored at 4℃ for further use. Powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) data has been collected on Panalytical' s X' Pert Pro with Cu Kα radiation, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images were recorded on JEOL