Isolation of Lysozyme from Egg White
This exercise serves as an introduction to the ideas behind protein purification and determination of enzyme specific activity. Students prepare lysozyme from egg white using ion exchange chromatography. The procedure is simple and requires little time or complicated equipment. It takes advantage of lysozyme's remarkably high pI (over 11); even well above neutral pH, lysozyme has a net positive charge, resulting in its retention by a cation exchange matrix when other proteins in egg white would run through due to a net negative charge. Cation exchange matrices that might be used include phosphocellulose and carboxymethyl- or sulfopropyl-substituted cellulose, Sephadex, or Sepharose (I use S-Sepharose). For cation exchange chromatography, the buffer used should consist of neutral and anionic species. You could go high-tech and use a Good buffer such as TAPS, CHES, or CAPS, but I recommend glycine, which is cheap and has a pKa of around 9.5, which is ideal for this application.
I prepare the egg white mixture ahead of lab by diluting an egg white with five volumes of 25 mM glycine, pH 9.2; even at only 25 mM, the buffer holds the pH at 9.2. I shear the mixture and homogenize gently with a teflon-glass homogenizer, strain through four layers of cheesecloth, and finally, just before the lab period, filter through a fast-flow paper (such as Fisher P8 or Whatman #4). The concern is that if the albumin coagulates, which it does quite readily, it will clog the chromatography column.
Students load 5 mL of this filtered mixture onto a 3-mL bed of S-Sepharose equilibrated with the glycine buffer and wash it on with 4 mL of glycine buffer. They then elute the column with 4 mL portions of glycine buffer containing 0.10 M and 0.75 M NaCl. Incidentally, the flow rate can be increased substantially, without otherwise interfering with the separation, by hanging a 3-4 inch length of plastic tubing (such as PE-205 attached to a blunted 16-gauge hypodermic needle) to the bottom of the column. Lyso