  The industrial implementation of biofuel production from lignocellulosic
biomass faces a number of economic obstacles. One of these is the cost of
enzymes, typically used for cellulose hydrolysis. Nature provides some hints
towards the efficiency of this process, exampled in natural enzyme complexes -
cellulosomes, produced by some microorganisms. Therefore, many research groups
target synthetic routes to mimic such cellulosomes with synthetic structures
when many questions remain to be addressed: the optimal chemical structure and
size of such synthetic scaffolds, their adsorption on the cellulosic biomass
particles, combinations, and best practices arrangement of enzymes in the
complex. In this work, polyethylene glycol (PEG) copolymers that form micelles
and accommodate enzymes in the micellar structures are systematically studied
using both experimental and computer simulation techniques. Preliminary results
indicate that the micelles are efficient polymer - enzymes structures for
cellulose hydrolysis. While the direct quantitative comparison between the real
and model systems is not always straightforward, both approaches agree on the
role of the molecular architecture of the copolymers on micelle formation and
their structural characteristics.
