Mixed-bed affinity chromatography: principles and methods

Mixed-bed chromatography is far from being a well-established technology within the panoply of bioseparation tools. Composed of an assembly of distinct sorbents that are mixed in a single bed, they have been mostly developed in the last decade for the reduction of dynamic concentration range where they allowed discovering many low-copy proteins within very complex proteomes. Other interesting preparative applications of mixed-bed chromatography have since been developed. In this chapter the basic concepts first and then detailed application recipes are described for (1) the reduction of protein dynamic concentration range, (2) the removal of impurity traces at the last stage of a biopurification process, and (3) the selection and use of sorbents as mixed bed in protein purification.