Highly Porous Polymer Monolith Immobilized with Aptamer (RNA) Anchored Grafted Tentacles and Its Potential for the Purification of Lysozyme

An aptamer immobilized tentacle-type monolith is prepared for lysozyme purification with excellent selectivity and high adsorbing capacity. In this study, the aptamer immobilized glycidyl methacrylate (GMA) serves as monomer to be grown into long polymer chains on a highly porous monolith by a series of reactions. This tentacle grafting gives rise to a sharp increase of aptamer coverage density and realizes the multilayer adsorption for protein. The dynamic adsorption capacity of the grafted monolith reaches 68.22 and 77.07 mg mL(-1) for lysozyme at the breakthrough of 10% and 50%, respectively, up to approximately 10-fold higher than the ungrafted one. Despite the high adsorption capacity, the novel aptamer anchored tentacle grafted monolith separates perfectly lysozyme from the protein mixture, indicating the excellent adsorptive selectivity. By taking the advantages of high capacity and excellent selectivity, the affinity-grafted monolith is applied successfully to purify lysozyme from the diluted chicken egg white solution.