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 proteinrecovery, especially from raw materials. In the last decade, due to itschemical, mechanical and structural properties, chitosan has been gainingattention in numerous application fields including downstream processingof proteins. The search for low cost chromatographic supports presents adrawback when the target protein is in a raw particulated material. Chitosan can be formatted to perform purification processes. In thissense, this work deals with the development and utilization of low costchitosan as affinity chromatographic matrices to purify different proteinsfrom sweet whey, equine serum, wheat germ extract, and insect cells andlarvae extracts. Chitosan matrices were synthesized in the format ofhighly porous mini-spheres with diameters around 1.8 mm in order to beused in protein purification processes in batch mode. These mini-sphereswere directly used as an affinity matrix to purify wheat germ agglutinin(WGA), or were derivatized by attaching different specific ligands, suchas WGA or triazine dyes, to purify sialylated proteins and cheese wheyproteins.