A simple method for removing aluminum from adenosine-5′-triphosphate

Commercial preparations of ATP are contaminated with aluminum, a potent inhibitor of both brain and yeast hexokinase at neutral pH (Womack, F. C., and Colowick, S. P. (1979) Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 76, 5080–5084 and Solheim, L. P., and Fromm, H. J. (1980) Biochemistry, in press). In an effort to remove this ion, we have developed an extraction procedure that eliminates more than 99% of the contaminant with no loss of nucleotide. The method involves repeated extractions of the nucleotide solution with 8-hydroxyquinoline in chloroform, followed by one extraction at higher pH, that removes the final 10% of the aluminum contaminant that seems to be sequestered in a slowly dissociating complex and is unavailable to the 8-hydroxyquinoline at low pH.