Useful Tips For Fab Protein Purification

By Deborah Grainger
First published September 12, 2016 on www.Biocompare.com

While protein purification is a well-established, conventional and highly trusted discipline, the approaches it employs can be as diverse as its targets. This makes a lot of sense as proteins come in many different sizes, structures and possess unique binding affinities and biological activities. As such, it’s not surprising that specific proteins require purification strategies tailored to their own unique physico-chemical properties. The isolation of a mitochondrial coenzyme, for instance, will require a different approach to the purification of an antibody Fab fragment. Moreover, these examples likely represent two different scales of protein purification; the former target would most likely be purified at the exploratory level, with Fab fragments at lab scale proportions and beyond (due to their application in therapeutics). However, despite these fundamental differences in purification requirements, there are certain steps you can take towards purification success that are applicable to the majority of proteins. Here we review some essential tips for Fab protein purification.