Many publications describe methods for peroxidase purification from plant material. When the goal was to obtain a high purity enzyme every purification method included an affinity chromatography step using Concanavalin A as the ligand. However, the adsorption step was carried out under quite different conditions with regard to pH, ionic strength and metal cation content in the binding buffer, thus leading to a rather confuse situation. To establish the best conditions for purification of peroxidases from horseradish root (HRP) and soybean hull (SBP), equilibrium adsorption isotherms were fitted to the Langmuir-type model, where ionic strength, pH and cation concentration were chosen as the variables. For SBP, our results showed that Kd rounded 10-6 M in all cases (pH 5.0 - 7.0, 1 and 5 mM Mn2+ / Ca2+, 0 - 0.75 M NaCl). For HRP, Kd ranged between 10-5 M and 10-6 M depending on the parameters. Under optimised binding conditions, 84.3% SBP was recovered after elution carried out with 0.74 M a -methyl-D-mannopyranoside and 0.37 M NaCl. For HRP, the recovery was lower (75%) and 0.36M a -methyl-D-mannopyranoside was necessary for the elution step.

High-performance affinity matrices were obtained by attaching pseudobiospecific ligands to hollow-fibre membranes. The neutral protease contained in FlavourzymeTM was purified to homogeneity with Yellow 4R-HE affinity hollow-fibre membranes. Immobilisation of Red HE-3B allowed purification of a milk-clotting enzyme obtained by solid-state culture of Mucor bacilliformis. Copper immobilisation through iminodiacetic acid allowed fractionation of Biocon Bioconcentrated PlusTM to separate the pectinesterase-containing fraction. The productivity of the developed processes - 1900, 94 and 750 U/ml.min, respectively - was 10- to 15-fold higher than that achieved with the same ligands immobilised on agarose-based soft gels, mainly due to the shortening of the purification processes.

A process of directed evolution applied to obtain a library of mutants of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) enzyme is described. We have introduced slight variations into the original DNA shuffling protocol. A DNA template was prepared by PCR amplification and digested with Dnase I during 1 hour. Dnase I products were concentrated by precipitation with isopropanol. Gel electrophoresis showed fragments of the desired size range (20-600 pb) without a full-length template remaining in the reaction mixture. A high concentration of fragments was crucial for performing PCR without primers. In this case, a template concentration of 32.5 ng/mu l was appropriate. Amplification of recombinant genes in a standard PCR reaction (template dilution 1:100) produced a smear with a low yield for the full-length sequence. A single product of the correct size was obtained by PCR with nested primers separated from the previously used primers by 40 pb. In our laboratory, native HRP has been functionally expressed in a baculovirus expression vector system. The purpose is to develop the screening of the first generation of random mutants in this system. To facilitate detection of those clones that have high peroxidase activity, we developed a rapid method: after five days postinfection agarose plates with six wells were covered with DAB (3,3´-diaminobenzidine) and H2O2. The appearance of brown-black stain allows visualization of up to 100 active clones/well in only 1 min.