Effect of flow patterns on bovine serum albumin and ampicillin partitioning using aqueous two-phase systems in microdevice

The separation and purification of biomolecules via aqueous two-phase extraction (ATPE) has encountered a series of obstacles to its industrial implementation. Recently, the miniaturization of ATPE has attracted interest due to the increase of performance, the possibility of operating in a continuous mode, and easy to scale-up by numbering-up approach. However, there is a gap in the literature with regard to the effects of flow patterns on the partitioning of biomolecules using microdevices. Thus, the present study investigated the ATPE of bovine serum albumin (BSA) and ampicillin, a beta-lactam antibiotic, under different flow patterns (slug, droplet and parallel) by means of microdevices. The microdevices were manufactured with circular tubes in a senoidal shape and the ATPE were prepared from the mixture between aqueous solutions of polyethylene glycol (PEG) and dibasic potassium phosphate. Using 1.80 mm tubes, slug, droplet and parallel flow patterns were observed only in the PEG 1500/dibasic potassium phosphate system, while the parallel flow pattern was not stabilized in systems involving PEG 4000 and PEG 6000. Experiments using a droplet flow pattern showed higher values of recovery (56% after 10 min) and partition coefficient of BSA compared to the slug and parallel flow patterns. In experiments involving ampicillin, the extraction performance was practically independent of the flow patterns. The BSA recovery behaved as an inverse function of the diameter tubes, which achieved slightly superior performance than the batch experiment (67% after 10 min) using droplet flow pattern, 0.51 mm tubes and residence time of 10 min (69%).