Abstract
The variation in the biological function of proteins plays an important role in plasma medicine and sterilization. Several non-thermal plasma sources with different feeding gases are used worldwide for plasma treatment, including dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) and atmospheric-pressure plasma jet (APPJ) as the most commonly used sources. Therefore, in the present work, we used both DBD and APPJ plasma sources with N2 and air as feeding gases to evaluate the effects on the structural, thermodynamic, and activity changes of enzymes. In the current work, we used lysozyme as a model enzyme and verified the structural changes using circular dichroism (CD), fluorescence, and X-ray crystallography. In addition, we investigated the lysozyme thermodynamics using CD thermal analysis and changes in the B-factor from X-ray crystallography. The results showed that lysozyme activity decreased after the plasma treatment. From these analyses, we concluded that N2-feeding gas plasma disturbs the structure and activity of lysozyme more than Air feeding gas plasma in our experimental studies. This study provides novel fundamental information on the changes to enzymes upon plasma treatment, which has been absent from the literature until now.
Highlights
The production of highly reactive species (RS) such as reactive nitrogen species (RNS) and reactive oxygen species (ROS) by plasma at low temperature provides various advantages for flexible operations in various fields[1,2,3,4]
Until now no study has shown that what type of exact structural changes in proteins/enzyme occurred after the plasma treatment, what is the role of using different gases and different devices
Numerous studies emphasize the effect of RONS created by cold plasma sources on cells and tissues
Summary
The production of highly reactive species (RS) such as reactive nitrogen species (RNS) and reactive oxygen species (ROS) by plasma at low temperature provides various advantages for flexible operations in various fields[1,2,3,4]. Modification or oxidation of the various components interacting with cell membrane receptors results in the transfer of diverse signaling processes that can affect a wide range of cellular activities, including cell differentiation, cell proliferation, cell migration, deactivation of bacteria, anticancer activity, and wound healing[6] To understand these applications of plasma, numerous probable mechanisms have been suggested[19,20,21], no proper hypothesis has been put forward, and the precise mechanism is still elusive. To understand the mechanism of cold plasma on the structural changes and enzymatic activity, we have used lysozyme as a model protein. We studied the lysozyme activity after the DBD and APPJ treatments using different feeding gases
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