All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript

All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Funding This research was funded partly by Dicle University, Scientific Research Projects DUBAP-14-EZF-110. Introduction In the past, immunoglobulins (Igs) were used as a therapeutic agent to treat the diphtheria disease and this approach leads to the use of an antibody-based therapy [1,2]. Today, development of hybridoma technology dramatically increased the use of Igs in different biopharmaceutical areas for medical purposes [1,3,4]. Different ligands such as 2-mercapto-l-methylimidazole and 2-mercapto-benzimidazole have been previously utilized to develop Igs that, subsequently, showed a high separation efficiency during immunoglobulin G (IgG) purification [5,6]. Besides, immunoglobulin Y (IgY) was purified by resins from chicken with high recovery and purity [7,8]. Immunoglobulin M (IgM), the first produced antibody by the immune system to combat or stop an infection, is used in the stem cell research field as well as for treatment and management of life-threatening diseases [9,10,11,12,13]. hIgM dominantly exists in human serum (0.4 mg/mL) in the form of a cyclic pentamer with 950 kDa molecular weight [14]. Therapeutic studies require high purity and affordable downstream processing; therefore, method selection of hIgM purification plays a pivotal role in medical fields [4,15]. Precipitation and chromatographic methods are extensively used in hIgM purification from biological fluids. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) plays a key role in a simple enrichment process, for isolation of large molecules like hIgM even in large scale purification [1,4,16,17]. However, precipitation is time-consuming, ensures poor selectivity and the purification yields of hIgM are not highly pure for therapeutic studies [1,4]. To overcome these limitations of precipitation, chromatographic approaches such as hydroxyapatite, anion-exchange, hydrophobic and affinity chromatography [6,18,19,20,21,22,23,24] can be used. Affinity chromatography is usually preferred due to its high selectivity, which allows us to purify antibodies with a Diatrizoate sodium single step [4]. Immunoaffinity chromatography is a specific type of affinity chromatography, which is based on the certain and firm antigenCantibody interactions. Before the purification process, antigens or antibodies are covalently immobilized on support materials such as agarose, cellulose, acrylamide or chromatographic resins [25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. However, due to the low binding constant and large molecular size of hIgM, macroporous support materials like monoliths are preferably used during hIgM purification [17,21,22,25]. Cryogels have a great potential as an affinity separation tool for the isolation of large molecules such as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), antibodies, proteins and cells [32,33,34,35,36]. Herein, we developed an immunoaffinity cryogel column for single step PTPRQ separation of a human (hIgM) with high purity. For this purpose, a p(HEMA) based cryogel column was prepared via free-radical polymerization under semi-frozen conditions. After that, a p(HEMA) cryogel column was activated by cyanamide and then, anti-hIgM was attached covalently to the p(HEMA) cryogel column. Characterization of anti-hIgM attached the p(HEMA-I) column and p(HEMA) cryogel column were investigated by Diatrizoate sodium SEM, micro-computerized tomography (-CT), FTIR, a swelling test and macroporosity. In addition, the effect of organic and inorganic buffer solutions (pH 4.0C8.0), initial hIgM concentration (0C0.5 mg hIgM/mL), temperature effect (4C45 C) and ionic-strength [(0C0.5 mM, sodium chloride (NaCI) solution] on hIgM binding capacity of the p(HEMA-I) cryogel column were investigated. Moreover, p(HEMA-I) cryogel column-capacity to purify hIgM from artificial human plasma was also determined. Further, the purity of hIgM was investigated by SDS-PAGE. 2. Results and Discussion 2.1. Characterization The FTIR spectrum of the p(HEMA) cryogel column was given in the Supplementary Materials and our results were in accordance with previous studies [37,38]. -CT Diatrizoate sodium is a technique that analyzes the distribution of pores and the structure of the cryogel column with a high-resolution and a non-destructive 3-D format. X-rays were sent to the cryogel with an angle of 360 at intervals of 0.4. As seen in Figure 1A, the -CT image of the p(HEMA) Diatrizoate sodium cryogel was given and according to the -CT analysis (CT Analyzer, version: 1.18.4.0), total open porosity (percent) of the p(HEMA-I) column was found 95.2% by volume. Further, cross-section, surface topology and inner sides of p(HEMA) and p(HEMA-I) cryogel columns were investigated with SEM..