The Interaction Between Crystal Violet and Bovine Serum Albumin: Spectroscopic and Molecular Docking Investigations

Abstract

The present work reported the investigations on the interaction between a triphenylmethane industrial dye—crystal violet (CV)—and bovine serum albumin (BSA) by spectroscopic methods and molecular docking calculation. The static quenching mechanism of the intrinsic fluorescence of BSA by CV was deduced by the fluorescence measurements and the ground-state complex formation was confirmed from the UV-vis spectra. The site maker competition binding experiments together with the molecular docking showed that the CV molecule specifically bound on the subdomain IIA of BSA. The obtained values of thermodynamic properties of binding suggested that the hydrophobic interaction was dominated as suggested by molecular docking results that the CV molecule was surrounded by hydrophobic amino acid residues. The conformation change of BSA in the binding process was detected by circular dichroism spectra and Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectra and also reflected by the size change of BSA from the measurements by dynamic light scattering (DLS).