Bio-preservation Properties of Disaccharide Osmolytes on Protein Structure

Animals, especially extremophiles such as zebra fishes and tardigrades use osmolytes to prevent protein denaturation. In order to understand better the mechanism of how osmolytes prevents proteins from denaturing, we conducted Circular Dichroism melting measurements using Staphylococcal nuclease and Bovine serum albumin as model proteins. In this project, we compared the melting process of these model proteins with different concentrations of sucrose, trehalose (both osmolytes that had been established to stabilize protein structure), and sucralose (a common ingredient in sugar substitutes). We have observed a correlation with increase in trehalose and sucralose concentrations and increasing melting temperature of protein samples as expected from the literature. However, we also observe a correlation with increasing sucralose concentration with a decrease in melting temperature of the protein samples. This could potentially imply that sucralose have a destabilizing effect on protein structure. Further studies on the effect of other molecules such as Difluorinated trehalose and urea will be explored in the future.

    Item Description
    Name(s)
    Thesis advisor: Othon, Christina
    Date
    April 15, 2015
    Extent
    55 pages
    Language
    eng
    Genre
    Physical Form
    electronic
    Rights and Use
    In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted
    Restrictions on Use

    Access limited to Wesleyan Community only. Please contact wesscholar@wesleyan.edu for more information.

    Digital Collection
    PID
    ir:2046