Isothermal modelling of protein adsorption to thermo-responsive polymer grafted Sepharose Fast Flow sorbents

In this study, five adsorption isotherm models, that is, the Langmuir, Freundlich, Langmuir-Freundlich, Temkin and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller isotherms, were utilized for the analysis of the experimental adsorption data for six classes of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)-based thermo-responsive copolymer-grafted Sepharose Fast Flow sorbents of different copolymer compositions with two structurally related proteins, namely bovine holo-lactoferrin and bovine holo-transferrin at 20 and 50°C. The experimental data for bovine holo-lactoferrin could be mathematically fitted to the Freundlich and Temkin isotherms when the protein feed concentrations were in the range of 1-40 mg/mL at both 20 and 50°C. Similar analysis of the binding of the homologous protein, bovine holo-transferrin, to the same thermo-responsive copolymer-grafted sorbents revealed that the experimental data could be fitted to the Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin isotherms with coefficients of determination value over 0.90.