Biopolymer Functions under High Pressure

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Pressure is a thermodynamic parameter as important as temperature and lately many efforts are paid to use pressure as a new technique of processing of biopolymers as for the food processing. On a molecular basis pressure has been used to study the refolding and dissociation of proteins. These pressure effects are essentially based on the structural perturbation of mostly proteins caused by increasing pressure. The structural perturbation of the enzymes and proteins by pressure is highly dependent on the protein nature and oligomeric compositions.On the other hand, the pressure effect on enzyme activity is also based on the perturbation on protein structure and protein-ligand interactions, caused by increasing pressure. Sometimes pressure can even affect substrate or reaction specificity of enzymes and such an effect has been uniquely utilized to control some enzyme-catalyzed synthetic reactions by way of pressure.In this study we proceeded this principle to 1, study of the mechanism of enzyme reactions such as nucleases and proteoses ; 2, control of the productive enzyme reactions by pressure and 3, chemical and biochemical modification of an enzyme under reversible denaturation caused by high pressure.