Dimerization of Bovine Serum Albumin

Preparation methods have a large influence on the folding and oligomerization behaviour of proteins in solution. In an experiment carried out by Anton Paar, bovine serum albumin (BSA) dissolved in deionized water (BSA-H2O)  was compared to BSA re-suspended in the isotonic buffer PBS (BSA-PBS). Particle size results suggested that BSA-H20 had suffered denaturation and/or aggregation, while BSA-PBS primarily consisted in native BSA dimers. Molecular mass measurements performed on BSA-H20 returned erroneous results due to the multimodal nature of the sample, while those performed on BSA-PBS displayed the expected molecular mass of dimeric BSA.

Click on the link above to download this report and see the full details of this experiment and its interesting findings.