Dear colleagues We are working on a large bacterial protein (featuring a large number of repeats) that appears to copurify with a lot of other proteins after Ni-affinity chromatography and gel-filtration. We have tried adjusting the ionic strength of these runs and have gone to as high as 5M NaCl but only saw marginal improvements. It appears that the protein likes to stick to a lot of stuff, and in fact the number of repeats in a given construct appears to correlate with the extent of contaminants in our purification steps. We have admittedly never seen anything like this among the so many different, and often challenging, proteins, we have worked on in our group over the last few years.
We are now thinking of trying detergents in the buffers (at non-micellar concentrations), in conjunction with playing a bit with the pH to see if such an approach provides a 'stripping' effect. Interestingly, the protein has a calculated pI of 3.5 ! As the options for handling this protein are indeed quite numerous, we would be grateful for any additional input and possible tips/tricks. I will prompty post a summary of the thread. Best regards Savvas et al. ---- Savvas Savvides Unit for Structural Biology @ L-ProBE Ghent University K.L. Ledeganckstraat 35, 9000 Ghent, Belgium Tel/SMS/texting +32 (0)472 928 519 Skype: savvas.savvides_skype http://www.LProBE.ugent.be/xray.html
