Polyhistidine-tagging is the option of choice for purifying recombinant proteins in denaturing conditions because its mode of action is dependent only on the primary structure of proteins. For example, even when a recombinant protein forcibly expressed in "E. coli" produces an inclusion body and can not be obtained as a soluble protein, it can be purified with denaturation with urea or guanidine hydrochloride. Generally, for this sort of a technique, histidine binding is titrated using pH instead of imidazole binding—at a high pH, histidine binds to nickel or cobalt, but at low pH (~6 for cobalt and ~4 for nickel), histidine becomes protonated and is competed off of the metal ion. Compare this to antibody purification and GST purification, a prerequisite to which is the proper (native) folding of proteins involved. On the other hand, it is said that the His tag tends to aggregate and insolubilize more than other affinity tags.