Isolation and characterization of bioactive lactoferrin from camel milk by novel pH-dependent method for large scale production

Abstract

The present article exemplifies a novel method to isolate highly purified bioactive lactoferrin from camel milk. Cytotoxicity of lactoferrin against the Hela cells was used to evaluate its bioactivity. SDS-PAGE and LC-MS analysis was done for its identification and characterization. The purified camel milk lactoferrin was found to be 708 amino acids in length with a molecular weight of 77.3 kDa and a pI value of 8.24. This pH-dependent isolation procedure ensures the retention of bioactive lactoferrin from camel milk. The importance of the present work lies in its simplicity and scalability for manufacturing bioactive lactoferrin at an industrial level.

Keywords

• Camel milk
• Whey
• Lactoferrin
• pH-dependent isolation
• Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS)
• Cytotoxicity assay