Bioseparation and other

Use of chromatographic supports is frequent in many different subdisciplines of the life sciences. One may then ask, why should cryogels be used There are several properties of these gels that make them well suited to meet some of the challenges that bioseparation and other aspects of life science are facing. 

Smart polymers for bioseparation and other biotechnological applications... 

Many of the crucial problems for researchers in this area are the same as the ones encountered in other areas of surface and interfacial science. The research of chemical engineers on high-performance ceramic materials, field-induced bioseparations, and fouling also addresses phenomena such as agglomeration and clustering in dispersions and rheology of dispersions. For EPIDs,... 

The development of genetically engineered plants offers the prospect of pharmaceutical production from crops as well as improved yields for cereals, vegetables and other agricultural products. The challenge will then be to find suitable bioseparations to enable the efficient isolation of such products. 

Novel and effective bioseparation techniques must be continuously researched and developed for profitable removal of proteins and other bioproducts of interest from very dilute solutions (A. Ramakrishnan and A. Sadana, personal communication, 1999). There appear to be two techniques that have tremendous potential for commercial applications the reverse micelle technique and aqueous two-phase extraction. Before these techniques achieve their potential, it will be necessary to further delineate the effect of mass transfer, interactions at the interfaces, and other parameters that affect both the quality and quantity of proteins separated by these techniques. It is also necessary to have a large data bank of a wide variety of proteins and bioproducts with regard to their characteristics and stability to assist future improvements in bioseparations. 

Understanding and mimicking of the cellular transport processes are both challenging and rewarding from scientific and technological point of view. For example in certain inherited diseases (such as cystinuria), specific transport systems are either defective or missing [1]. Cystinuria is a human disease characterized by the absence of a transport system that carries cystine and other amino acids into kidney cells. Kidney cells normally reabsorb these amino acids from the urine and return them to the blood, but a person inflicted with cystinuria develops painful stones from amino acids that accumulate and crystallize in the kidneys. Similarly, there are many technological applications of these transport processes, e.g., bioseparations, bioextractions, and synthetic nano-bioreactors. 

An overview chapter by Hamel and Hunter presents the state of the art of research on bioseparations. Extraction processes using biphasic aqueous systems, liquid membranes, reversed-micellar systems, and membrane processes are all being actively studied. Significant advances in these topics, including predictive mathematical models, are presented in the first section. The second section includes several papers on affinity and other interaction techniques that are finding uses in protein purification. In the last section, we offer several reports that delineate advances in isolation and purification processes such as electrophoresis and chromatography. 

As mentioned before, the basis of bioseparation and unit operation is based on the differences of physicochemical properties of the materials (Figure 2.2). Chromatography methods are not always the best option due to variable yield losses and high costs. ° Therefore, various attempts have been made to find new separation processes focusing on cost reduction. Among these options, a versatile and promising technique is that of the foam fractionation (Figure 2.2), an adsorptive bubble separation technique in which the principle of separation is based on the differences in the surface activity of molecules. It has been used to separate proteins, but it can also be used for other purposes [e.g. the concentration of plant secondary metabolites). ... 

The ability to control the interaction between a wide diversity of biomolecules with surfaces can be also exploited as an effective way to develop reagentless, sensitive, reusable, and real-time biosensors [51-56]. Such sophisticated biosensors are expected to impact a wide range of applications, from clinical diagnosis[57] and environmental monitoring [58] to forensic analysis [59]. Another significant potential application of dynamic surfaces is in bioseparation of proteins and other biomolecules for basic life science research, as well as industrial applications [60-63]. With the rapid development of recombinant proteins in the treatment of various human diseases, the dynamic surface-based bioseparation systems could meet the demand for more reliable and efficient protein purification methods [64]. Stimuli-responsive surfaces are also expected to play a crucial role in the search for more controllable and precise drug delivery systems [65]. 

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