Title
Preparation of Bioderived and Biodegradable Surfactants Based on an Intrinsically Disordered Protein Sequence
Date Issued
14 March 2022
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
University of California Berkeley
Publisher(s)
American Chemical Society
Abstract
Surfactants, block copolymers, and other types of micellar systems are used in a wide variety of biomedical and industrial processes. However, most commonly used surfactants are synthetically derived and pose environmental and toxicological concerns throughout their product life cycle. Because of this, bioderived and biodegradable surfactants are promising alternatives. For biosurfactants to be implemented industrially, they need to be produced on a large scale and also have tailorable properties that match those afforded by the polymerization of synthetic surfactants. In this paper, a scalable and versatile production method for biosurfactants based on a hydrophilic intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) sequence with a genetically engineered hydrophobic domain is used to study variables that impact their physicochemical and self-assembling properties. These amphiphilic sequences were found to self-assemble into micelles over a broad range of temperatures, pH values, and ionic strengths. To investigate the role of the IDP hydrophilic domain on self-assembly, variants with increased overall charges and systematically decreased IDP domain lengths were produced and examined for their sizes, morphologies, and critical micelle concentrations (CMCs). The results of these studies indicate that decreasing the length of the IDP domain and consequently the molecular weight and hydrophilic fraction leads to smaller micelles. In addition, significantly increasing the amount of charged residues in the hydrophilic IDP domain results in micelles of similar sizes but with higher CMC values. This represents an initial step in developing a quantitative model for the future engineering of biosurfactants based on this IDP sequence.
Start page
1462
End page
1470
Volume
23
Issue
3
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Biotecnología industrial
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85126307765
PubMed ID
Source
Biomacromolecules
ISSN of the container
15257797
Sponsor(s)
This work was supported by the California Research Alliance (CARA) by BASF, the UCSF Hana Jabsheh Fund, National Institutes of Health Grant R01GM032543, and the Chemical Biology Graduate Program at UC Berkeley (NIH T32-GM066698). S.H.K. was supported by the University of California Cancer Research Coordinating Committee (UCCRC) predoctoral fellowship. J.M.G. was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Some figure elements were created with the online platform BioRender.com .
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