Screening polymeric ionic liquids for chromatography-based purification of bacteriophage M13

M13 bacteriophage is a key instrument in phage display applications, as well as a possible antibacterial therapeutic agent due to its highly restrictive bacterial pathogenesis, and other applications. The traditional phage purification process is usually achieved by gradient ultracentrifugation or a combination of precipitation, centrifugation and microfiltration. These approaches easily lead to long process times, high operational costs, phage aggregation and consequent product loss (approximately 60%). This work is thus focused on an alternative potential large-scale process to achieve high yield and purity while minimizing the operational costs. Electrostatic-based separation processes are also common biomolecules purification techniques. Although anion exchange chromatography has been used before to purify several viral particles, this technique has been poorly reported for the purification of M13 phage. In a recent work, our group has demonstrated the use of a predominant anion exchange process, where a polymeric ionic liquid (PIL) was used as an alternative separation matrix for M13 bacteriophage. In this work, a variety of system parameters was studied, including chemical structure of the cation and the anion, the crosslinker nature and its concentration, either in batch adsorption/elution or chromatographic operation mode. The PIL-based chromatographic operation mode revealed to be a suitable separation process for M13 from directly filtered E. coli supernatant, reaching over 70% M13 recovery and 4.6 purification factor in a single step. To our knowledge, this is the first time that PILs have been reported as separation agents for bioproducts from complex mixtures.publishe

Castelo Branco Agenda XXI. Diagnóstico para a Sustentabilidade

O Diagnóstico para a Sustentabilidade do Concelho de Castelo Branco tem dois grandes objectivos: - Apresentar um diagnóstico do Concelho, simples e acessível; - Apontar para as Áreas Estratégicas, em que assentará Castelo Branco Agenda XXI, posteriormente validadas pela comunidade/actores locais. Tem como propósito abranger e integrar num mesmo documento uma descrição actual e representativa dos sistemas ambientais, sociais, económicos e institucionais do concelho de Castelo Branco, resultando na identificação das suas potencialidades e fragilidades. Deste modo, obtém-se a definição das oportunidades e ameaças do concelho, de forma a assentar as grandes opções estratégicas do Desenvolvimento Sustentável, através de um modelo – Castelo Branco Agenda XXI. Assim, o Diagnóstico para a Sustentabilidade permite avaliar a realidade concelhia e efectuar uma análise prospectiva, nomeadamente no que respeita à identificação de problemas e oportunidades, em consonância com o já planeado pela CMCB, no sentido do Desenvolvimento Sustentável e da melhoria da qualidade de vida