Design Parameters in Affinity Chromatography

Well over 400 papers have been published in the past few years which describe the application of the affinity method to the purification of biopolymers. It is fair to say that most are concerned only with solving a unique problem at hand, be it to purify a given enzyme, antigen, or whatever. Very likely the majority of the scientists with the isolation or purification problem at hand are not in a situation to consider more than a few variations on the several stock “recipes” in the literature. If only some of the tricks should happen work, then the results may be reported as a partial purification of the material. the attempts do not work outright, of course they do not see print. It is not clear that the failures are understood or why only partial purification was achieved.