Biocatalysis and enzymatic reactions play a very important role in students’ everyday life, but they are often overlooked in current chemistry curricula. Here, we present a set of easy-to-implement experiments that can be used in high school classrooms. An immobilized lipase is used as biocatalyst in esterification, hydrolysis, and transesterification reactions, with conversion monitored and optimized via instrumental analytics. We also propose experiments that demonstrate reusability of the lipase and how it can be washed off the carrier material. All of the optimized procedures we developed can be tracked via odor or vision in the classroom. Furthermore, the experiments were tested and refined in learning settings with high school and undergraduate students as well as in-service teachers where they received a positive evaluation for their perceived attractiveness.
Stueckler et al. (Fri,) studied this question.