Preservation of Biological LH and FSH Activity after Application on HPLC. Comparison between Cation-Exchange and Reverse-Phase High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Abstract

A cation-exchange high-performance liquid chromatography procedure is described for the separation of bioactive lutropin from follitropin in a human urinary gonadotropin standard preparation (1st IRP 70/45). The results clearly demonstrate that recovered protein retained most of its biological activity following the chromatography. Due to a lack of efficient and quick methods for purifying pituitary or urinary gonadotropins, this method could prove to be valuable for this purpose. This method has also been shown to be quick (less than 20 min) and efficient for separation of impurities or degradation products from bovine follitropin with 92% preservation of its biological activity. Our results suggest that ion exchange HPLC procedure will play a powerful role in the isolation of gonadotropins and other biologically active compounds.