Protein adsorption and transport in agarose and dextran-grafted agarose media for ion exchange chromatography: Effect of ionic strength and protein characteristics

This work investigates the effects of ionic strength and protein characteristics on adsorption and transport of lysozyme, BSA, and IgG in agarose-based cation exchangers with short ligand chemistry and with charged dextran grafts. In all cases, the adsorption equilibrium capacity decreased with increasing salt. However, the adsorption kinetics was strongly influenced by the adsorbent structure and protein characteristics. For the smaller and positively charged lysozyme, the effective pore diffusivity was only weakly dependent on salt for the dextran-free media, but declined sharply with salt for the dextran-grafted materials. For this protein, the dextran grafts enhanced the adsorption kinetics at low salt, but the enhancement vanished at higher salt concentrations. For BSA, which was near its isoelectric point for the experimental conditions studied, the effective diffusivity was low for all materials and almost independent of salt. Finally, for the larger and positively charged IgG, the effective diffusivity varied with salt, reaching an apparent maximum at intermediate concentrations for both dextran-free and dextran-grafted media with the kinetics substantially enhanced by the dextran grafts for these conditions. Microscopic observations of the particles during protein adsorption at low ionic strengths showed transient patterns characterized by sharp adsorption fronts for all materials. A theory taking into account surface or adsorbed phase diffusion with electrostatic coupling of diffusion fluxes is introduced to explain the mechanism for the enhanced adsorption kinetics observed for the positively charged proteins.