Preparative ion exchange chromatography of proteins from dairy whey

The purpose of this work was to develop preparative liquid chromatographic methods for the separation of the four major proteins and lactose from dairy whey. Experiments using a new commercial anion exchange resin were carried out to determine the optimum conditions for initially separating the proteins alpha lacta-lbumin, beta lactoglobulin, bovine serum albumin, and immunoglobulin G from a sweet dairy whey mixture. The separation was accomplished with simultaneous step elution changes in salt concentration and pH. It was found that the anion exchange step was most effective in separating beta lactoglobulin from the feed mixture. Following the anion exchange separation, its breakthrough curve was processed using a new commercial cation exchange resin to further recover the valuable im-munoglobulin G. The whey output from an east Tennessee cheese manufacturer was used as a feedstock for the preparative scale experiments and as a reference in scaling to an economically optimized production level operation.