Kinetics of adsorption of globular proteins at an air-water interface (original) (raw)

Protein adsorption at air–water interfaces: A combination of details

Biopolymers, 2004

Using a variety of spectroscopic techniques, a number of molecular functionalities have been studied in relation to the adsorption process of proteins to air–water interfaces. While ellipsometry and drop tensiometry are used to derive information on adsorbed amount and exerted surface pressure, external reflection circular dichroism, infrared, and fluorescence spectroscopy provide, next to insight in layer thickness and surface layer concentration, molecular details like structural (un)folding, local mobility, and degree of protonation of carboxylates. It is shown that the exposed hydrophobicity of the protein or chemical reactivity of solvent‐exposed groups may accelerate adsorption, while increased electrostatic repulsion slows down the process. Also aggregate formation enhances the fast development of a surface pressure. A more bulky appearance of proteins lowers the collision intensity in the surface layer, and thereby the surface pressure, while it is shown to be difficult to a...

Lysozyme adsorption at the air/water interface

Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, 1990

The adsorption of reductively methylated chicken egg white lysozyme (EC 3.2.1.17) to the air/water interface has been measured by the radiotracer technique. This method enables direct determination of surface excess concentration as well as relative rates of adsorption and desorption. Improvements in calibration and radiolabeling techniques led to differences between the present results and previous lysozyme isotherms reported in the literature. The isotherm indicates monolayer saturation at low concentrations of bulk protein (below 2 × 10-5 wt%) and multilayer adsorption at high concentrations (above 10-3 wt%). At intermediate concentrations, an abrupt increase in surface concentration with increasing bulk concentration indicates a change in orientation of the adsorbed protein molecules. Adsorption experiments performed by sequential addition of protein to the bulk solution provide evidence that lysozyme molecules adsorbed at concentrations below the multilayer region do not exchange significantly with lysozyme molecules in the bulk solution. A kinetic model which incorporates the monolayer plateau, the multilayer adsorption, and the change of orientation of adsorbed lysozyme is presented.

Quantitative Description of the Relation between Protein Net Charge and Protein Adsorption to Air−Water Interfaces

Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 2005

In this study a set of chemically engineered variants of ovalbumin was produced to study the effects of electrostatic charge on the adsorption kinetics and resulting surface pressure at the air-water interface. The modification itself was based on the coupling of succinic anhydride to lysine residues on the protein surface. After purification of the modified proteins, five homogeneous batches were obtained with increasing degrees of modification and-potentials ranging from-19 to-26 mV (-17 mV for native ovalbumin). These batches showed no changes in secondary, tertiary, or quaternary structure compared to the native protein. However, the rate of adsorption as measured with ellipsometry was found to decrease with increasing net charge, even at the initial stages of adsorption. This indicates an energy barrier to adsorption. With the use of a model based on the random sequential adsorption model, the energy barrier for adsorption was calculated and found to increase from 4.7kT to 6.1kT when the protein net charge was increased from-12 to-26. A second effect was that the increased electrostatic repulsion resulted in a larger apparent size of the adsorbed proteins, which went from 19 to 31 nm 2 (native and highest modification, respectively), corresponding to similar interaction energies at saturation. The interaction energy was found to determine not only the saturation surface load but also the surface pressure as a function of the surface load. This work shows that, in order to describe the functionality of proteins at interfaces, they can be described as hard colloidal particles. Further, it is shown that the build-up of protein surface layers can be described by the coulombic interactions, exposed protein hydrophobicity, and size.

Experimental studies on the desorption of adsorbed proteins from liquid interfaces

Food Hydrocolloids, 2005

The desorption of proteins from liquid interfaces depends on the conditions under which they have been adsorbed. At low concentrations, the adsorption process takes a comparatively long time and the molecules arriving at the interface have enough space and time to adsorb and unfold. In contrast, adsorption from higher concentrated solutions is faster and adsorbing molecules strongly compete from the beginning of the process. The rate of desorption is studied as a function of the adsorption layer coverage in order to understand to what extend protein adsorption is reversible. The experimental findings cannot give a clear answer on the reversibility, however, the theoretical analysis shows that desorption rates for proteins are many orders of magnitude lower than those for usual surfactants. q

Adsorption of Denaturated Lysozyme at the Air-Water Interface: Structure and Morphology

Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids, 2018

The application of protein deuteration and high flux neutron reflectometry has allowed a comparison of the adsorption properties of lysozyme at the air-water interface from dilute solutions with and without strong denaturants, urea and guanidine hydrochloride (GuHCl). The surface excess and adsorption layer thickness were resolved and complemented by images of the mesoscopic lateral morphology from Brewster angle microscopy. It was revealed that the thickness of the adsorption layer in the absence of added denaturants is less than the short axial length of the lysozyme molecule, which indicates deformation of the globules at the interface. Two-dimensional elongated aggregates in the surface layer merge over time to form an extensive network at the approach to steady state. Addition of denaturants in the bulk results in an acceleration of adsorption and an increase of the adsorption layer thickness. These results are attributed to incomplete collapse of the globules in the bulk as a ...

Spreading of proteins and its effect on adsorption and desorption kinetics

Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces, 2007

The kinetics of adsorption of lysozyme and ␣-lactalbumin from aqueous solution on silica and hydrophobized silica has been studied. The initial rate of adsorption of lysozyme at the hydrophilic surface is comparable with the limiting flux. For lysozyme at the hydrophobic surface and ␣-lactalbumin on both surfaces, the rate of adsorption is lower than the limiting flux, but the adsorption proceeds cooperatively, as manifested by an increase in the adsorption rate after the first protein molecules are adsorbed. At the hydrophilic surface, adsorption saturation (reflected in a steady-state value of the adsorbed amount) of both proteins strongly depends on the rate of adsorption, but for the hydrophobic surface no such dependency is observed. It points to structural relaxation ("spreading") of the adsorbed protein molecules, which occurs at the hydrophobic surface faster than at the hydrophilic one. For lysozyme, desorption has been studied as well. It is found that the desorbable fraction decreases after longer residence time of the protein at the interface.

A New Model of Protein Adsorption Kinetics Derived from Simultaneous Measurement of Mass Loading and Changes in Surface Energy

Langmuir, 2007

We describe a novel technology based on changes in the resonant frequency of an acoustically actuated surface and use it to measure temporal changes in the surface energy γ (N m-1) of an elastomeric polymer membrane due to the adsorption of macromolecules from aqueous solution. The resonant elastomeric surface-tension (REST) sensor permits simultaneous determination of mass loading kinetics and γ(t) for a given adsorption process, thereby providing a multivariable data set from which to build and test models of the kinetics of adsorption at solid-liquid interfaces. The technique is used to measure γ(t) during the adsorption of either sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) or hen egg-white lysozyme (HEWL) onto an acrylic polymer membrane. The adsorption of SDS is reversible and is characterized by a decrease in γ over a time period that coincides with that required for the mass loading of the membrane. For the adsorption of HEWL labeled with Alexa Fluor 532 dye, γ continues to change long after the surface concentration of labeled HEWL, measured by using the elastomeric polymer membrane as an optical waveguide, reaches steady state. Gradual but significant changes in γ(t) are observed as long as the concentration of protein in the bulk solution, c b , remains nonzero. HEWL remains adsorbed to the membrane when c b) 0, but changes in γ(t) are not observed under this condition, indicating that the interaction of bound protein molecules with those free in solution contribute to the prolonged change in the surface energy. This observation has been used to define a new model for the kinetics of globular protein adsorption to a solid-liquid interface that includes a mechanism by which the molecules in the bulk can facilitate the desorption of a sorbate molecule or change the energetic states of adsorbed molecules and, thus, the overall surface energy. The model is shown to capture the unique features of protein adsorption kinetics, including the relatively fast mass loading, the much more gradual change in surface energy that does not cease until the protein is removed from the bulk, the rapid desorption of an incubation-time-dependent fraction of bound protein when the protein is removed from the bulk, and the fixing of the residual surface concentration and surface energy at constant values once the removal of reversibly bound protein and free protein is complete.

The adsorption and unfolding kinetics determines the folding state of proteins at the air–water interface and thereby the equation of state

Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, 2006

Unfolding of proteins has often been mentioned as an important factor during the adsorption process at air-water interfaces and in the increase of surface pressure at later stages of the adsorption process. This work focuses on the question whether the folding state of the adsorbed protein depends on the rate of adsorption to the interface, which can be controlled by bulk concentration. Therefore, the adsorption of proteins with varying structural stabilities at several protein concentrations was studied using ellipsometry and surface tensiometry. For β-lactoglobulin the adsorbed amount (Γ) needed to reach a certain surface pressure (Π) decreased with decreasing bulk concentration. Ovalbumin showed no such dependence. To verify whether this difference in behavior is caused by the difference in structural stability, similar experiments were performed with cytochrome c and a destabilized variant of this protein. Both proteins showed identical Π-Γ , and no dependence on bulk concentration. From this work it was concluded that unfolding will only take place if the kinetics of adsorption is similar or slower than the kinetics of unfolding. The latter depends on the activation energy of unfolding (which is in the order of 100-300 kJ/mol), rather than the free energy of unfolding (typically 10-50 kJ/mol).

Formation of Protein/Surfactant Adsorption Layer at the Air/Water Interface as Studied by Dilational Surface Rheology

The Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 2011

The dynamic dilatational surface elasticity of mixed solutions of globular proteins (β-lactoglobulin (BLG) and bovine serum albumin (BSA)) with cationic (dodecyltrimethylammonium bromide (DTAB)) and anionic (sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)) surfactants was measured as a function of the surfactant concentration and surface age. If the cationic surfactant concentration exceeds a certain critical value, the kinetic dependencies of the dynamic surface elasticity of BLG/ DTAB and BSA/DTAB solutions become nonmonotonous and resemble those of mixed solutions of proteins with guanidine hydrochloride. This result indicates not only the destruction of the protein tertiary structure in the surface layer of mixed solution but also a strong perturbation of the secondary structure. The corresponding kinetic dependencies for protein solutions with added anionic surfactants are always monotonous, thereby revealing a different mechanism of the adsorption layer formation. One can assume that the secondary structure is destroyed to a lesser extent in the latter case and hinders the formation of loops and tails at the interface. The increase of the solution's ionic strength by the addition of sodium chloride results in stronger changes of the protein conformations in the surface layer and the appearance of a local maximum in the kinetic dependencies of the dynamic surface elasticity in a relatively narrow range of SDS concentration.