Perspectives of immobilized-metal affinity chromatography

Immobilized Metal-Affinity Chromatography (IMAC) represents a relatively ne w separation technique that is primarily appropriate for the purification o f proteins with natural surface-exposed histidine residues and for recombin ant proteins with engineered histidine tags or histidine clusters. Because the method has gained broad popularity in recent years, the main recent dev elopments in the field of new sorbents, techniques and possible application s are discussed in this article. Advantages of the method and new prospects are described as well as the problems and concerns that appear when the me thod is to be used for production of pharmaceutical-grade proteins. (C) 200 1 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.