Stem Bromelain from Ananas Comosus

Extraction, Isolation, and Purification of Stem Bromelain from Ananas Comosus

Presenter: Alexa Arce Garcia

Co-Presenter(s):
Jacob Padilla, Janin Correa

Presenter Status: Undergraduate student

Academic Year: 20-21

Semester: Spring

Faculty Mentor: Monica Lares

Department: Chemistry

Screenshot URL: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=106x0tW1YgxWC1ovRF-Jy6KdhCY4wSudO

Abstract:
Bromelain is cysteine protease enzyme that is found within the stem and fruit of a pineapple. This enzyme works to breakdown proteins. This enzyme has a wide variety of uses in pharmaceutical, cosmetic and culinary industries. Methods to extract, isolate and purify bromelain in a cost effective and at high yields are desirable in its manufacturing. The stem of the pineapple is shown to have the highest amount of bromelain and is also a byproduct of pineapple food products which could help keep manufacturing cost down. Here we test two purification methods, cation exchange chromatography and gel filtration chromatography to isolate stem bromelain from pineapple stem taken from two organic pineapples. We found here that cell lysis followed by cation exchange chromatography yields a high specific activity. However followed by gel filtration, specific activity of the enzyme decreases significantly. We hypothesize that extracting stem bromelain from a different source (more of the pineapple stem) would aid in having higher concentration of the enzyme. Further research to identify the reasons for decrease in specific activity is needed as well as performing SDS PAGE on the enzyme to identify it with a molecular weight of about 30-33 kDa.