Facile synthesis of peanut-like Sn-doped silica nano-adsorbent for affinity separation of proteins

A peanut-like hollow silica (denoted as p-l-hSiO(2)) adsorbent is prepared in a facile method, which is composed of several silica nanospheres and has an average diameter of 22 nm, with thickness of 5 nm. Its Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) surface area, pore volume and pore size are 258.9 m(2) g(−1), 1.56 cm(3) g(−1) and 3.9 nm, respectively. Then the afforded p-l-hSiO(2)/GSH adsorbent is applied to purify glutathione S-transferases-tagged (denoted as GST-tagged) proteins. It is found that the p-l-hSiO(2) adsorbent exhibits a specific adsorption, a high binding capacity (6.80 mg g(−1)), good recycling performance and high recovery (90.1%) to the target proteins, showing promising potential for the affinity separation of GST-tagged proteins.