Bovine Milk Whey Protein Purification by Mixed Mode Chromatography

Since the beginning of 2010, several adsorbent materials with multimodal characteristics have been
launched on the market. The main characteristics of these material are multiple interactions between target-molecule and the multimodal ligand. The present work aims to verify the use of multimodal resin Capto MMC in the process of separation of bovine milk whey proteins. For this, bovine milk serum samples were submitted to a pre-treatment consisting the following steps: precipitation, dialysis and lyophilization. The lyophilized samples were resuspended under the conditions defined previously by a factorial design 23. Fatorial design were performed in order to obtain the best operational conditions in both loanding and elution steps. In all of these experiments, we investigate the buffer pH, ionic strength of buffer system and also elution time. Chromatographic experiments were performed on the FPLC-Contichrom equipment. Total protein content was calculated by Bradford and protein separation was verified by electrophoresis assays with 12% polyacrylamide gels. According to the results, the highest percentages of protein recovery was 40.13%. It was verified high selectivity for both bovine serum albumin and the β-lactoglobulin dimer. Thus, it was concluded that Capto MMC presented a good capture performance.