Separation by Adsorption. I. General Principles

Abstract

Proteins adsorb to a variety of types of solid phases, usually in a selective manner. Consequently adsorption techniques, especially when adopted in column chromatography, have become widely used; they frequently result in purification steps that give the greatest increase in protein purity, that is, in the case of an enzyme isolation, the greatest increase in specific activity. Although column chromatography is the ideal way of getting optimum resolution, batchwise adsorption methods should not be forgotten, since they can be very rapid, and so are valuable techniques when speed is a priority (see also Chapter 7).