Ionic liquid-regenerated macroporous cellulose monolith: Fabrication, characterization and its protein chromatography

Macroporous cellulose monolith as chromatographic support was successfully fabricated from an ionic liquid dissolved cellulose solution by an emulsification method and followed by the cross-linking reaction and DEAE modification. With the physical characterization, the cellulose monolith featured by both the interconnected macropores in range of 0.5-2.5μm and the diffusion pores centered at about 10nm. Given the bimodal pore system, the monolith possessed the specific surface area of 36.4m²g^-1 and the column permeability of about 7.45×10^-14m². After the DEAE modification, the anion cellulose monolith was evaluated for its chromatography performances. It demonstrated that the static and dynamic adsorption capacity of BSA reached about 66.7mgmL^-1 and 43.9mgmL^-1 at 10% breakthrough point, respectively. The results were comparable to other chromatographic adsorbent. In addition, the proteins mixture with different pI was well separated at high flow velocity (611.0cmh^-1) and high protein recovery (over 97%), proving the macroporous cellulose monolith had excellent separation performance. In this way, the prepared cellulose monolith with bimodal pores system is expected for the potential application in high-speed chromatography.