Effect of nucleic acid contamination on partitioning of proteins in two-phase PEG-Dextran system

Downstream processing of bioproducts results in considerable losses of compounds of interest in a large number of cases. For the intracellular enzyme tartrate dehydrogenase, an analysis of the laboratory process for enzyme recovery revealed that maximum losses occur in the initial stages of purification when the enzyme is separated from nucleic acids and other undesirable enzymes. Hence, aqueous twophase extraction was studied to investigate the separation of several enzymes from nucleic acids. Single-component and binary equilibria for three commercially available enzymes (bovine serum albumin, trypsin, chymotrypsin) and yeast RNA were studied in a two-phase system consisting of dextran and polyethylene glycol (PEG). The effects of pH and concentrations of the components and salts (NaC1) were investigated.