5-Aminobenzimidazole as new hydrophobic charge-induction ligand for expanded bed adsorption of bovine IgG

Expanded bed adsorption (EBA) can capture target proteins directly from unclarified feedstock without prior solid-liquid separation. Hydrophobic charge-induction chromatography (HCIC) is a promising technology for biomolecule separation with high capacity, good selectivity and relatively low cost without the pretreatment of dilution or salt addition. In this work, EBA and HCIC were combined to develop a new separation technology, hydrophobic charge-induction EBA. Two HCIC ligands, 4-mercapto-ethyl-pyridine (MEP) and 5-aminobenzimidazole (ABI), were coupled onto agarose beads containing tungsten carbide to prepare the resins for EBA, named T-MEP and T-ABI, respectively. The static adsorption and dynamic binding behaviors of bovine IgG (bIgG) were investigated. Two resins had similar saturated adsorption capacities and salt-tolerant properties, but T-ABI showed higher dynamic binding capacity than T-MEP, indicating that ABI ligand was more suitable for EBA. The performances in expanded bed were verified. With the protein mixture (2 mg/ml bIgG and 10 mg/ml bovine serum albumin) as the model feedstock, the effects of loading and elution pH, expansion factor and loading volume on the separation performance of bIgG were evaluated. Finally, T-ABI EBA was used to separate bIgG directly from bovine whey with optimized operation conditions. The purity and recovery of bIgG reached 90.6% and 78.2%, respectively. The purification factor was about 19.3. The results demonstrated that the combination of HCIC and EBA would be a potential platform for antibody capture with less feedstock pretreatments, high efficiency and relatively low cost.