Abstract

Foam Separation of Proteins

Author(s): M. Arulmozhi, C. Sudha, K. M. Meera, S. Begum and N. Anantharaman

In downstream processing of biochemical products, the separation of a product component from the nutrient medium containing many residual substrates is a very important operation. Foam separation, an adsorptive bubble separation method, has emerged as an alternative to traditional separation techniques such as ion exchange, chromatography and precipitation. A study about the enrichment of water soluble binary proteins namely ‘Bovine serum albumin’ and ‘Bovine hemoglobin’ was carried out in a batch column. The effects of gas flow rate, liquid pool height, protein concentration, pH of the feed and foam height on the enrichment of proteins by foam separation was studied to optimize various parameters. The separation of binary proteins was found to highest at pH 5.5. An enrichment ratio of 1.42 was obtained at the optimum operating conditions of 0.2 Lpm of air flow rate, 20 cm of liquid pool height, feed concentration of 1.8 mg/mL of BSA and 1 mg/mL of hemoglobin, 5.5 pH of feed and 25 cm of foam height.