Liquid protein formulations are prone to form aggregates. The effect of nonionic surfactants such as Polysorbate 20 (PS 20) and n-Dodecyl β-D-maltoside (DDM) on the prevention of aggregation and conformational changes of recombinant human IFNβ-1b (rhIFN β_1b) was explored. Polysorbate has been used in formulations of protein pharmaceuticals. There have been concerns about using PS 20 due to its...

Stopped-flow circular dichroism and fluorescence spectroscopy are used to characterize the assembly of complexes consisting of plasmid DNA bound to the cationic lipids dimethyldioctadecylammonium bromide and 1, 2-dioleoyl- 3-trimethylammonium-propane and a series of polyamidoamine dendrimers. The kinetics of complexation determined from the stopped-flow circular dichroism measurements suggests ...

Arg96 is a highly conservative residue known to catalyze spontaneous green fluorescent protein (GFP) chromophore biosynthesis. To understand a role of Arg96 in conformational stability and structural behavior of EGFP, the properties of a series of the EGFP mutants bearing substitutions at this position were studied using circular dichroism, steady state fluorescence spectroscopy, fluorescence l...

Sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS), an anionic surfactant that mimics some characteristics of biological membrane has also been found to induce aggregation in proteins. The present study was carried out on 25 diverse proteins using circular dichroism, fluorescence spectroscopy, dye binding assay and electron microscopy. It was found that an appropriate molar ratio of protein to SDS readily induced a...

We have investigated the mechanisms that target oxidized calmodulin for degradation by the proteasome. After methionine oxidation within calmodulin, rates of degradation by the 20 S proteasome are substantially enhanced. Mass spectrometry was used to identify the time course of the proteolytic fragments released from the proteasome. Oxidized calmodulin is initially degraded into large proteolyt...

We investigate the thermal denaturation of human serum albumin and the associated solvation using terahertz (THz) spectroscopy in aqueous buffer solution. Far- and near-ultraviolet circular dichroism spectroscopy reveal that the protein undergoes a native (N) to extended (E) state transition at temperature ≤55°C with a marginal change in the secondary and tertiary structure. At 70°C, the protei...

The conformational equilibria of a guanine-rich sequence found at the promoter region of the human c-kit oncogene are studied by means of circular dichroism spectroscopy (CD) and variable-temperature size exclusion chromatography (SEC). It is shown that the wild sequence ckit21 exists as a mixture of monomeric and multimeric G-quadruplexes. Appropriate mutation of several bases in the wild sequ...

The interaction of nanomaterials with biological macromolecules is an important foundation of the design and the biological safety assessments of nanomaterials. This work aims to investigate the interaction between pristine C60 and serum albumins (human serum albumin and bovine serum albumin) in solution. Stable aqueous dispersion of C60 was prepared by simple direct ultrasonic method and chara...

The dynamic transfer of a conjugated polymer's organization-dependent properties from the solution state to the solid film state was probed by circularly polarized luminescence (CPL) and circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy. Different supramolecular organizations within films and aggregate solutions of a chiral poly(p-phenylenevinylene) derivative led to opposite CPL and CD spectra. These drama...

Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is widely used in structural biology as a technique for examining the structure, folding and conformational changes of proteins. A new server, ValiDichro, has been developed for checking the quality and validity of CD spectral data and metadata, both as an aid to data collection and processing and as a validation procedure for spectra to be included in publi...