Ultrafiltration membrane-based purification of bioconjugated gold nanoparticle dispersions

• Purification of peptide–conjugated gold nanoparticles by removal of excess peptide with diafiltration demonstrated.
• Cellulose ultrafiltration membrane with cut-off of 30 kDa with best purification performance.
• With analogous membrane, diafiltration with better performance and scalability compared to centrifugal filtration.

Functionalization of nanoparticles (NP) with biomolecules to form bioconjugated systems has received large attention in biomedical applications. However, purification of these nanoparticle bioconjugates from unbound free biofunctional ligands (e.g., peptides) remains a significant challenge in the production of well-defined materials. The conventional separation methods often compromise the product’s properties and recovery. In this work, removal of excess of unbound peptides after the bioconjugation step to yield functionalized gold nanoparticles (AuNP) was achieved by exploiting the sieving properties of commercial regenerated cellulose (RC) ultrafiltration (UF) membranes. The RC membrane with nominal molecular weight cut-off (NMWCO) of 30 kDa precisely fractionated the mixtures and purified gold nanoparticle–peptide bioconjugates in a pressure driven semi-continuous diafiltration process. The RC 30 kDa membrane showed absolute rejection of the bioconjugated AuNP and the recovery of AuNP–peptide bioconjugate in the retentate was >87% relative to the initial amount in the mixture. In addition, the separation efficiency and throughput results were much better compared to the centrifugal membrane filtration method using an analogous membrane. All results indicate that by choice of an appropriate membrane type and barrier pore size, and with optimized solution chemistry and filtration parameters, ultrafiltration membranes, and in particular RC membranes, can be very well suited for the purification of bioconjugated nanoparticle dispersions, and the diafiltration mode is very well suited for upscaling.

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