Negatively Charged Composite Nanofibrous Hydrogel Membranes for High-Performance Protein Adsorption

Abstract

Nanofibrous materials are considered as promising candidates for fabricating high-efficiency chromatography media, which are urgently needed in protein pharmaceuticals purification and biological research, yet still face several bottlenecks. Herein, novel negatively charged composite nanofibrous hydrogel membranes (NHMs) are obtained by a facile combination of electrospinning and surface coating modification. The resulting NHMs exhibit controllable morphologies and chemical structures. Benefitting from the combined effect of the stable framework of silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanofiber and the function layer of negatively charged hydrogel, as well as good pore connectivity among nanofibers, NHMs exhibit a high protein adsorption capacity of around 1000 mg g−1, and are superior to the commercial cellulose fibrous adsorbent (Sartobind®) and the reported nanofibrous membranous adsorbents. Moreover, due to their relatively stable physicochemical and mechanical properties, NHMs possess comprehensive adsorption performance, favorable resistance to acid and solvents, good selectivity, and excellent regenerability. The designed NHMs composite adsorbents are expected to supply a new protein chromatography platform for effective protein purification in biopharmaceuticals and biochemical reagents.

Comparison of host cell protein removal by depth filters with diatomaceous earth and synthetic silica filter aids using model proteins

“…The binding capacities for the positively‐charged proteins (α‐chymotrypsin and ribonuclease A) are significantly larger in the lower ionic strength buffer, consistent with the presence of significant attractive electrostatic interactions with the negatively‐charged X0SP media; the zeta potential of the media determined from the measured electrophoretic mobility was −28 ± 2 mV. This is similar to the zeta potential for electrospun cation exchange nanofiber hydrogel membranes examined by Fu et al (2022).…”

Advances in high‐throughput, high‐capacity nonwoven membranes for chromatography in downstream processing: A review

“…Thanks to the flexibility of electrospinning, membrane mats are produced using various polymers that can be modified to add different functionalities. Ethylene‐vinyl alcohol (EVAL), cellulose, cellulose acetate, nylon, copolymers and silk nanofibers have been functionalized as anion and cation exchangers, with multimodal ligands as well as with metal chelate groups (Amaly, El‐Moghazy, et al, 2018, 2020, 2020; Cheng et al, 2022; Duan et al, 2018; Fu et al, 2016, 2019; Wang et al, 2019) while Shan et al has produced inorganic nanofibrous membranes (Fu et al, 2022; Shan et al, 2017). All materials have been characterized in terms of structural and surface properties and tested for adsorption mainly with pure protein solutions in batch adsorption experiments obtaining static binding capacities for lysozyme as high as 716 mg/g for the BTCA@EVAL‐3 membrane (Fu et al, 2019) and of 10 mg/g of the silk nanofibers functionalized with carboxylic groups (Yi et al, 2017) that were among the best performing materials.…”