Production of nanofiber-based membranes for biomolecule recovery

• Autor(a) principal: Antunes, Bernardo Paiva
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/3248
• topic: Membranas de dupla face; Electrospinning

The demanding of ever-increasing quantities of highly purified biomolecules by bioindustries has triggered the development of new, more efficient, purification techniques. The application of membrane-based technologies has become very attractive in this field, for their high throughput capability, simplicity of operation and scale-up. In this thesis it is reported the production of a bi-layer membrane by electrospinning (ES), in which a support of poly ε-caprolactone nanofibers was coated with a polyethylene oxide/sodium alginate layer, and subsequently cross-linked with calcium chloride. The membranes were characterized by SEM, ATR-FTIR, contact angle measurements, and then were applied in the recovery process of a plasmid. The results obtained show that membranes retained the suspended solids while allowing the permeation of plasmid DNA, with high recovery yields and improved RNA retention. Moreover, they also showed a very low fouling tendency.