Oxireductases in the Enzymatic Synthesis of Water-Soluble Conducting Polymers - Enzymatic Polymerisation - page 16

Fig. 13 Electrical conductivity of films obtained from the aqueous solutions after several runs.
(Reprinted with permission from Sikora et al. [ 47 ]. c 2009, Wiley)

HRP/IL phase. The electrical conductivity of the PANI films prepared by solvent
casting from the aqueous solutions showed a relatively high and similar value even
after the fifth run (Fig. 12 ) , which demonstrates the validity of our approach and the
ease of recyclability and reuse of the enzyme inside the IL. For the PEDOT, the pro-
cess of recovery and reuse was successfully repeated up to ten times using the same
HRP/EDOT catalytic phase (Fig. 13 ) , further confirming the success of the syn-
thetic approach and the ease of recyclability and reuse of the enzyme inside the
EDOT monomer phase.

6 Conclusions

This review chapter summarizes some of the most successful strategies recently in-
troduced in the field of biocatalytic synthesis of ICPs as an attempt to solve the
most problematic issues concerning the practical application of this technology.
First, the use of a new bifunctional template in the enzymatic synthesis of PANI
(DODD) is proposed, reaching, as a consequence, higher solubilities and electri-
cal conductivities than those obtained when monofunctional templates are used.
Second, a successfully performed enzymatic polymerization of EDOT in the pres-
ence of PSSNa is presented, proving that the biocatalytic strategy can also be applied
to technologically interesting conducting polymers others than PANI. The obtained
PEDOT polymer films showed excellent electrical conductivity (2 10 − 3 Scm − 1

,
as well as film formation capacity, with excellent surface roughness at the micro-
scopic level. Finally, a new biphasic polymerization strategy is demonstrated that

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