Fabrication and characterization of porous cellulose beads with high strength and specific surface area via preliminary chemical cross-linking reaction for protein separation

Porous cellulose beads are widely used in the adsorption field, in which enhancing the structure stability and enlarging the specific surface area are the ways to improve the adsorption efficiency. Here, a preliminary chemical cross-linking (PCC) strategy is explored to construct the tough and highly porous cellulose beads as high efficient adsorbent. Especially, the customized cellulose solution is preliminarily mixed with a cross-linking agent for emulsification and followed by cellulose regeneration. The entrapped cross-linking agent creates the inner covalent linkages between the neighboring long cellulose chains, which accounts for strong mechanical strength of cellulose framework. Meanwhile, the entrapped covalent bonds disrupt the normal growth of cellulose crystalline and lead to more amorphousness, which conduces to high specific surface area. Finally, the proposed cellulose beads, after being modified by DEAE, were evaluated for protein adsorption. As a result, the obtained porous cellulose beads exhibits high adsorption capacities (BSA: 204.58 mg g−1; BHb: 144.78 mg g−1) and excellent structure stability. Taken together these properties, the porous cellulose beads developed here enjoy great potential for separation application.