Protein purification
is of vital importance in the food industry,
drug discovery, and other related fields. Among many separation methods,
polyelectrolyte (PE)-based phase separation was developed and recognized
as a low-cost purification technique. In this work, spherical polyelectrolyte
brushes (SPBs) with a high specific surface area were utilized to
study the protein accessibility and selective protein binding on highly
charged nanoparticles (NPs) as well as the selective phase separation
of proteins. The correlation between charge anisotropy, protein binding,
and phase separation was investigated on various protein systems including
those proteins with similar isoelectric points (pI) such as bovine
serum albumin (BSA) and β-lactoglobulin (BLG), proteins with
similar molecular weights such as BSA and hemoglobin (HB), and even
protein variants (BLG-A and -B) with a tiny difference of amino acids.
The nonspecific electrostatic interaction studied by turbidimetric
titrations and isothermal calorimetry titration (ITC) indicates a
specific binding between proteins and SPBs arising from the charge
anisotropy of proteins. An optimized output based on selective protein
binding on SPBs could be correlated for efficient protein separation
through tuning external conditions including pH and ionic strength.
These findings, therefore, proved that phase separation based on selective
protein adsorption by SPBs was an efficient alternative for protein
separation compared with the traditional practice.