The sweet taste-modifying protein miraculin has been successfully expressed in the tomato, a high-yield commercial plant (Sun et al. 2007). Previously proposed methods of purifying untagged miraculin from transgenic tomato fruit are laborious and time consuming and do not allow the separation of undenatured and denatured miraculin. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient method of purifying undenatured miraculin from transgenic tomato fruit. In this study, we have demonstrated that the combined use of nickel-immobilized affinity chromatography and ion-exchange chromatography readily provides highly purified undenatured miraculin, as demonstrated by the observation of both a single peak from reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography and a single band from SDS-PAGE.Key words: Miraculin, nickel column, taste-modifying protein, tomato, transgenic plants.Plant Biotechnology 28, 281-286 (2011) DOI: 10.5511/plantbiotechnology.11.0207a
Original PaperAbbreviations: HPLC, high performance liquid chromatography; IMAC, immobilized metal affinity chromatography; SDS-PAGE, sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, TBS, tris-buffered saline. This article can be found at