Rotational and translational dynamics of lysozyme in water–glycerol solution

Abstract

In this paper, we report a study of the effect of solvent viscosity on both translational and rotational dynamics of a simple model protein: the egg white lysozyme. For this, we investigated the dynamical properties of lysozyme in mixtures water–glycerol by means of parallel measurements of photon correlation spectroscopy (PCS) and dielectric spectroscopy at radiofrequencies (DS). In the framework of the Debye–Stokes–Einstein theory, the translational and rotational coefficients allow an estimation of hydrodynamic radius of the protein. A decoupling between translational and rotational dynamics, observed as a different estimation of hydrodynamic radius, is reported in the literature for some systems. In order to ascertain if this effect is present also in our sample, we performed PCS and DS measurements on lysozyme–water–glycerol solutions. The content of glycerol was in the range of 0–70% w/w, with a solvent viscosity from 0.9 to about 10 cpoise, and the protein concentration was up to 20 mg ml −1. The average sizes of lysozyme, obtained by the two methods, are remarkably different at high protein concentrations. However, the values of hydrodynamic radius extrapolated to infinite dilution are coincident and independent of glycerol. These results indicate that the diffusive behavior of lysozyme in the water–glycerol mixture is coherent with the Debye–Stokes–Einstein hydrodynamic model.