The Use of Chitosan Mini-Spheres for High Value Protein Purification from Raw Materials

Abstract

This review describes the use of chitosan for high value protein recovery, especially from raw materials. In the last decade, due to its chemical, mechanical and structural properties, chitosan has been gaining attention in numerous application fields including downstream processing of proteins. The search for low cost chromatographic supports presents a drawback when the target protein is in a raw particulated material. Chitosan can be formatted to perform purification processes. In this sense, this work deals with the development and utilization of low cost chitosan as affinity chromatographic matrices to purify different proteins from sweet whey, equine serum, wheat germ extract, and insect cells and larvae extracts. Chitosan matrices were synthesized in the format of highly porous mini-spheres with diameters around 1.8 mm in order to be used in protein purification processes in batch mode. These mini-spheres were directly used as an affinity matrix to purify wheat germ agglutinin (WGA), or were derivatized by attaching different specific ligands, such as WGA or triazine dyes, to purify sialylated proteins and cheese whey proteins.