Precipitation of Antibodies Using the Nucleotide Binding Site

Antibodies have generated a breakthrough within the biotechnology industry over the past decades in both pharmaceutical areas for treatment of immunological, cancer and cardiovascular diseases, as well as endless applications for biomedical research specifically for molecular diagnostics, cellular imaging, among others. However, the production is still maintained at a high cost mainly due to the current purification method used based on the use of packed columns with proteins A / G.

In this way, the present study shows a variant to a method proposed in the scientific literature based on the precipitation of the antibodies through the formation of complexes and their precipitation with ammonium sulfate. The variation relies on the usage of trivalent molecules that have a particular affinity for the unconventional site named as the nucleotide binding site (NBS) on antibodies.