Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SA1-P021
SYNTHESIS OF MESOPOROUS CARBON XEROGELS WITH
CUSTOMIZED POROSITY FOR PROTEIN SEPARATION
Luis Adrián Ramírez Montoya 1 , Ana Arenillas 1 , J. Ángel Menéndez 1 , Miguel Montes Morán 1
1 Instituto Nacional del Carbón (INCAR-CSIC), Procesos químicos en energía y medio ambiente,
Spain.
Protein adsorption on mesoporous materials has been intensively studied and
plenty of technical applications have been envisaged including drug delivery,
biosensing systems, biocatalysis and coating of chemical devices. There have
been many studies of the potential to use mesoporous materials for
biomolecules adsorption and separation. It has been shown that this type of
materials is useful for stable entrapment of biomolecules and the stabilization
of biologically interesting molecules under different conditions. In this sense the
use of mesoporous carbon xerogels are interesting for this purpose since their
properties can be tailored for different proteins and applications. These
materials, obtained after the carbonization under N2 atmosphere in a tubular
furnace a 700 °C of an organic gel product of the polymerization reaction
between resorcinol and formaldehyde in presence of water and methanol
media and using NaOH as catalyst, represent an attractive alternative for use in
protein fractionation. In addition, the use of microwave heating can reduce
drastically the time hence their cost of production. The versatility of these
materials allows producing carbon xerogels with highly controlled porosity with
a narrow pore size distribution in the mesoporous range. In this sense, three
mesoporous carbon xerogels with an average pore size of 15, 30 and 55 nm
were obtained and labelled as CX-15, CX-30 and CX-55 respectively. The
homogeneity and tailored porosity of these carbon xerogels make them
appropriate for application in the separation of complex mixtures of different
biomolecules. Cytochrome C, BSA, Lysozyme and Myoglobin were selected as
model proteins for adsorption and separation tests based on its differences in
molecular size and isoelectric point with a good performance in the separation
of binary mixtures varying the CX used and the experimental conditions in terms
of pH and ionic strength. A selective adsorption of target proteins in these
materials could be achieved through mainly three mechanisms involved: size
exclusion, electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions with the presence of
synergistic and antagonistic effects depending on the protein mixture and
experimental conditions used.