Combination of aqueous two-phase flotation and inverse transition cycling: Strategies for separation and purification of recombinant β-glucosidase from cell lysis solution

This work was developed to solve the problems of the restriction of non-specific adsorption and time-dependent denaturation in the purification of recombinant proteins by multistage chromatographic procedures. A novel purification method (ATPF-ITC) which combining aqueous two-phase flotation (ATPF) with inverse transition cycling (ITC) was established and used to efficiently purify recombinant β-glucosidase (GLEGB) from cell lysis solution. First, GLEGB would preferentially adsorb on the nitrogen bubble interface relied on the hydrophobic property of the graphene-binding (GB) tag and enter into the top phase of ATPF. Second, GLEGB was achieved further purification by one-round ITC method based on the thermosensitive of the elastin-like polypeptide (ELP) tag. Consequently, the enzymatic activity recovery of GLEGB was 124.92% ± 0.83%, and the purification factor reached 24.26 ± 0.22. The purification results remained stable after six polymer cycles, and the process of ATPF-ITC had no negative effect on the structure of recombinant protein.