Hydrogel covered bimetallic Co:Ni magnetic nano alloy for protein adsorption in biomedical application

In this study, polyacrylamide (PAAm) hydrogel covered CoNi magnetic nanoalloys with various Co/Ni molar ratio (from 1/4 to 4/1) were synthesized, characterized and used for adsorption of Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA). XRD, EDS, VSM, SEM, AFM, Automated Gas Sorption Analyzer and Fluorescence measurements were used for characterizations and adsorption studies. The results confirm that all the synthesized nanoalloys have soft ferromagnetic nature and particles size were determined to be in the range of 8.60–12.19 nm. Adsorption performances of magnetic nanoalloys were investigated on bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a model protein. The results showed that prepared CoNi:PAAm composites have multistage adsorption kinetics for BSA and increasing Ni content in the CoNi nanoalloys enhance the adsorption rate constant and the rate constant can be tuned between 0.003 s⁻¹ and 0.009 s⁻¹ and between 0.01 s⁻¹ and 0.60 s⁻¹ for the first order adsorption and the second order adsorption stages, respectively. These results show that CoNi:PAAm composites can open new pathways for preparing a special composite material which has specific adsorption kinetic for bio-separation technology.