Protein affinity chromatography structures

Protein affinity chromatography can be used for the separation of an individual compound, or a group of structurally similar compounds from crude-reaction mixtures, fermentation broths, or cell lysates by exploiting very specific and well-defined molecular interactions... 

Nickel affinity chromatography was chosen as the primary purification technique because it is a fast and reliable one-step assay and purified complexes can often be used in downstream applications without the necessity of removing the polyhistidine tag. In addition, the polyhistidine tag is smaller than many other affinity tags targeted by commercially available affinity resins and, in most cases, does not seem to interfere with the structure and function of the recombinant protein. 

Figure 6.17 Schematic representation of the basic principles of metal chelate affinity chromatography. Certain proteins are retained on the column via the formation of coordinate bonds with the immobilized metal ion (a). The actual structure of the most commonly used metal chelator, iminodiacetic acid, is presented in (b)...

Affinity chromatography was carried out on columns prepared with lightly carboxymethylated chitin, which is known to be a poor substrate for lysozyme. Both native lysozyme and regenerated 13-105 were bound to the column at pH 7 and eluted at pH 3. As controls, the basic proteins cytochrome c and pancreatic RNase A, as well as concanavalin A and a-amylase, were not bound from the same solvent at pH 7. These findings constitute a third line of evidence for formation of native-like structure in regenerated 13-105. 

Analytical tools have been developed in order to identify carbohydrate structures as well as carbohydrate-binding proteins and to understand their underlying structure-function relationships of protein-carbohydrate and carbohydrate-carbohydrate interactions lectin arrays [16], glycan microarrays [17, 18], glyco-nanoparticles [19], frontal affinity chromatography [20] and carbohydrate tools for metabolic labeling [21]. 

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