High-productivity membrane adsorbers: Polymer surface-modification studies for ion-exchange and affinity bioseparations

This dissertation centers on the surface-modification of macroporous membranes to make them selective adsorbers for different proteins, and the analysis of the performance of these membranes relative to existing technology. The common approach used in these studies, which is using membrane technology for chromatographic applications and using atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP) as a surface modification technique, will be introduced and supported by a brief review in Chapter 1. The specific approaches to address the unique challenges and motivations of each study system are given in the introduction sections of the respective dissertation chapters.;Chapter 2 describes my work to develop cation-exchange membranes. I discuss the polymer growth kinetics and characterization of the membrane surface. I also present an analysis of productivity, which measures the mass of protein that can bind to the stationary phase per volume of stationary phase adsorbing material per time. Surprisingly and despite its importance, this performance measure was not described in previous literature. Because of the significantly shorter residence time necessary for binding to occur, the productivity of these cation-exchange membrane adsorbers (300 mg/mL/min) is nearly two orders of magnitude higher than the productivity of a commercial resin product (4 mg/mL/min).;My work studying membrane adsorbers for affinity separations was built on the productivity potential of this approach, as articulated in the conclusion of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 focuses on the chemical formulation work to incorporate glycoligands into the backbone of polymer tentacles grown from the surface of the same membrane stationary phase. Emphasis is given to characterizing and testing the working formulation for ligand incorporation, and details about how I arrived at this formulation are given in Appendix B. The plant protein, or lectin, Concanavalin A (conA) was used as the target protein. The carbohydrate affinity membrane adsorbers were found to have a static binding capacity for con A (6.0 mg/mL) that is nearly the same as the typical dextran-based separation media used in practice. Binding under dynamic conditions was tested using flow rates of 0.1-1.0 mL/min. No bound lectin was observed for the higher flow rate. The first Damkohler number was used to assess whether adsorption kinetics or mass transport contributed the limitation to conA binding. Analyses indicate that this system is not limited by the accessibility of the binding sites, but by the inherently low rate of adsorption of conA onto the glycopolymer.;The research described in Chapter 4 focuses on reaction chemistry experiments to incorporate a phosphonate-based polymer in the membrane platform to develop a new class of affinity adsorbers that function based on their affinity for Arginine (Arg) amino acid residues. The hypothesis was that benzyl phosphonate-containing functional polymers would form strong complexes with Arg-rich proteins as a result of multivalent binding. Introducing a new class of affinity membranes for purification of Arg-rich and Arg-tagged proteins may have an impact similar to the introduction of immobilized metal ion affinity chromatography (IMAC), which would be a significant achievement. Using Arg-tags would overcome some of the associated drawbacks of using metal ions in IMAC. Additionally, some cell penetrating peptides are said to be Arg-rich, and this would be a convenient feature to exploit for their isolation and purification. Lysozyme was used as a model Arg-rich protein. The affinity membranes show a static binding capacity of 3 mg/mL. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).