Phycobiliproteins are fluorescent proteins mainly produced by red macroalgae and cyanobacteria. These proteins, essential to the survival of these organisms, find application in many fields of interest, from medical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic to food and textile industries. The biggest obstacle to their use is the lack of simple environmental and economical sustainable methodologies to obtain these proteins with high purity. In this work, a new purification process is proposed based on the induced precipitation of the target proteins followed by ultrafiltration. Purities of 89.5% of both phycobiliproteins and 87.3% of R-phycoerythrin were achieved using ammonium sulfate and poly(acrylic acid) sodium salts as precipitation agents (followed by an ultrafiltration step), while maintaining high recovery yields and protein structure stability. Environmental analysis performed to evaluate the proposed process shows that the carbon footprint for the proposed process is much lower than that reported for alternative methodology, and the economic analysis reveals the cost-effective character associated to its high performance. This work is a step toward more sustainable and effective methodologies/processes with high industrial potential.

中文翻译：

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基于诱导沉淀的藻胆蛋白纯化的可持续策略

藻胆蛋白是主要由红色大型藻类和蓝细菌产生的荧光蛋白。这些蛋白质对于这些生物体的生存至关重要，已在许多感兴趣的领域中得到应用，从医学，制药和化妆品到食品和纺织工业。使用它们的最大障碍是缺乏简单的环境和经济的可持续方法来获得高纯度的这些蛋白质。在这项工作中，基于诱导的目标蛋白沉淀然后超滤，提出了一种新的纯化方法。使用硫酸铵和聚丙烯酸钠盐作为沉淀剂（继之以超滤步骤），可以同时达到89.5％的藻胆蛋白和87.3％的R-藻红蛋白的纯度，同时保持较高的回收率和蛋白质结构稳定性。为评估拟议过程而进行的环境分析表明，拟议过程的碳足迹远低于替代方法所报告的碳足迹，而经济分析则揭示了其高性能带来的成本效益特征。这项工作是朝着具有高工业潜力的更可持续，更有效的方法/流程迈出的一步。