Influence of protein nativity on the stability of bovine serum albumin coated microbubbles
Palash Dhara,
Niyati Shah,
Vidya Sundaram,
Ashutosh Srivastava,
Alexander A. Solovev,
Yongfeng Mei,
Dmitry A. Gorin,
Krishna Kanti Dey
Affiliations
Palash Dhara
Laboratory of Soft and Living Materials, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382055, India
Niyati Shah
Laboratory of Soft and Living Materials, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382055, India
Vidya Sundaram
Department of Biological Sciences and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382055, India
Ashutosh Srivastava
Department of Biological Sciences and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382055, India
Alexander A. Solovev
Department of Materials Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433 P.R. China
Yongfeng Mei
Department of Materials Science, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433 P.R. China
Dmitry A. Gorin
Center for Photonics Sciences and Engineering, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, 3 Nobelya Str., 121205 Moscow, Russia
Krishna Kanti Dey
Laboratory of Soft and Living Materials, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Palaj, Gandhinagar, Gujarat 382055, India; Corresponding author
Summary: Protein-coated microbubbles have become one of the emerging platforms in biomedical research as theranostic agents. In recent years, microbubbles have been extensively used as ultrasound contrast agents and carriers of molecular cargoes, pertaining to which several studies have focused on tuning the properties of these bubbles to achieve a higher degree of biocompatibility and extended stability. Synthesis of microbubbles has so far been traditionally carried out with pre-heated proteins like bovine serum albumin (BSA) as shell coatings, owing to the ease in making BSA crosslinked structures through disulfide bridge formation. We, however, have performed experiments to demonstrate that air core microbubbles formed with native BSA are more stable compared with those formed using denatured BSA. The experimental observations have been supported with analytical modeling and computational studies, which offer insights into the effect of BSA conformation in stabilizing the microbubbles shells and prolonging their lifetimes.
