Energetics of the interactions of human serum albumin with cationic surfactant

Abstract

The heat capacity changes for interaction of human serum albumin (HSA) and a cationic surfactant—cetylpyridinium chloride (CPC), were studied at conditions close to physiological (50 mM HEPES or phosphate buffer, pH 7.4 and 160 mM NaCl) carrying out isothermal calorimetric titrations (ITC) at various temperatures (20–40 °C). ITC measurements indicated that the small endothermic changes associated with CPC demicellization were temperature independent at these conditions. Surprisingly, important enthalpy changes associated with binding of CPC to HSA were exothermic and temperature independent at lower concentrations (below 0.022 mM) of CPC and endothermic and temperature dependent at higher concentrations of CPC. The values of heat capacity changes were obtained for each studied concentration of CPC from the plot of enthalpy changes vs temperature. The obtained results demonstrate the temperature independence of heat capacity changes at entire range of studied CPC concentrations. Both enthalpograms and heat capacity curves indicate the two-step mechanism of HSA folding changes due to its interactions with CPC. The first step corresponds to transition from native state to partially unfolded state and the second to unfolding and to the loss of tertiary structure. The analysis of the results indicates that predominant cooperative unfolding occurs at CPC/HSA molar ratio region between 25 and 30. Such information could not be extracted from thermograms and describes the role of heat capacity as a major thermodynamic quantity giving insight on physical, mechanistic and even atomic-level into how HSA may unfold and interact with CPC. The effect of CPC binding on HSA intrinsic fluorescence, UV-Vis and CD spectra were also examined. Hence, the analysis of spectral data confirms the ITC results about the biphasic mechanism of HSA folding changes induced by CPC. The CD measurement also represents the conservation of considerable secondary structure of HSA due to interaction with CPC.