Facile fabrication of surface imprinted polymers based on nanofibrous aerogels for specific capture of lysozyme form egg white

The development of separation and purification materials with specific adsorption performance is essential to obtain high-purity proteins, especially in food industries. In this work, functional imprinting layers were introduced onto three-dimensional poly(vinyl alcohol-co-ethylene) nanofibrous aerogels (PVA-co-PE NFAs) to fabricate surface molecularly imprinted polymers for lysozyme specific capture. Citric acid (CA) modified PVA-co-PE NFAs (PCNAs) were used as substrate to immobilize the target lysozyme, and dopamine (DA) was selected as a functional monomer to generate imprinting layers with controllable thickness through self-polymerization. The obtained lysozyme imprinted PCNAs (LIPCNAs) exhibited an extreme high adsorption capacity (1010.33 mg/g), which is clearly superior to the currently reported imprinted protein adsorbents. The obtained LIPCNAs not only possessed imprinting factor (IF = 1.53) with reusability upon 10 cycles, but also capacity to extract lysozyme directly from egg white. The released lysozyme can maintain the initial secondary structure and biological activity.