Critical analysis of the apoferritin adsorption at solid–liquid interfaces in the framework of a particular adsorption model

Abstract

The adsorption mechanism of horse spleen apoferritin on smooth Si(Ti)O2 surfaces was investigated by means of optical wave guide lightmode spectroscopy (OWLS) as well as with atomic force microscopy (AFM), for which images of high resolution were obtained on muscovite mica surfaces. By the use of both experimental methods, the adsorption process could be studied from a kinetic as well as from a statistical thermodynamics point of view. This approach allowed to test the hypothesis of the occurrence of a particular type of deposition mechanism, namely the random sequential adsorption (RSA), by evaluating all the requirements that should be fulfilled in such a process. Only the requirement relative to the kinetics of the adsorption process, and subsequently, the estimation of the surface coverage at saturation is fulfilled by our experiments. From the fit of the theoretical kinetic equations corresponding to the RSA model to the experimental adsorption kinetics we find that the apoferritin molecules occupy an area of 140±30 nm2, in agreement with the values found by counting the number of particles per unit area in the AFM experiments and also with the saturation level of the adsorption isotherm. From our experiments we found that the evolution of the surface coverage close to saturation did not follow the expected power law evolution with time in the framework of the RSA model. Moreover, the dependence of the density fluctuations on the sub-surface area in the AFM image is not consistent with the expected evolution obtained by computer simulations based on the RSA model. These results emphasize the difficulty to study the adsorption mechanism of proteins at solid—liquid interfaces in the framework of any given adsorption model.