Development of a process for large-scale chromatographic purification of an alginate lyase from Klebsiella pneumoniae

Summary A process for purification of an alginate lyase, produced extracellularly by fermentation of Klebsiella pneumoniae, has been developed. The process includes two chromatographic steps and is well suited to large-scale operation. By hydrophobic interaction chromatography on Phenyl-Sepharose FF, followed by anion exchange chromatography on Q-Sepharose FF in a negative mode, the specific activity was increased from 0.09 units (U) mg ^–1 to more than 50 U mg^–1. Due to an extremely low product concentration in the fermentation broth, and large amounts of contaminating proteins, the chromatographic adsorbents had low capacities with respect to alginate lyase. By adsorption on the cation exchanger S-Sepharose FF, the capacity was so low that the enzyme could not be concentrated. The binding capacity of Phenyl-Sepharose FF was approximately 20-fold higher, and a three to tenfold concentration was obtained. The first stage of the process, hydrophobic interaction chromatography, has been applied to the isolation of alginate lyase from fermentation batches of 180 l. Several runs have resulted in a purified product with an average quantity of 30 000–35 000 U per fermentation, and an average specific activity of 4.5 U mg^–1. Although the raw material employed in this work has been particularly unfavourable, the process developed will also be applicable to raw materials with higher product concentrations. Offprint requests to: I. M. Aasen