Packaging and Delivering Enzymes By Amorphous Metal-Organic Frameworks

Crystalline metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been utilized to protect enzymes under harsh conditions¹. Generally, there are two approaches to incorporate enzymes in MOFs: adsorption of enzymes in as-synthesized crystalline MOFs^2-5, and in-situ encapsulation of enzymes by crystalline MOFs^6-11. However, the possibility of hosting molecules by amorphous MOFs with disordered and fuzzy structures has not been explored. We report the in-situ packaging of enzymes in amorphous MOFs (aMOFs) at ambient conditions. Mesopores in aMOFs as observed by cryo-electron tomography allow glucose oxidase (GOx) to display 20 times higher activity than that in crystalline MOFs. The delivery of GOx by aMOFs enables noninvasive measurement of glucose in a single living cell, which identifies cancer cells from normal cells. This capability shows great promise in cancer diagnosis and understanding tumor metabolism^12,13.