Joshua W. Lampe, Emergency Medicine, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 125 South 31st Street, Suite 1200, Philadelphia, PA 19104, Portonovo S. Ayyaswamy, Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, University of Pennsylvania, 229 Towne Building, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, and David M. Eckmann, School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, 331 John Morgan Building/6112, 3620 Hamilton Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Recently, work has been published which demonstrates the significant role of the solvent, usually water, in the protein adsorption process. A ‘Traube-rule-like' dependence of protein adsorption on molecular weight has been reported. This work has broadly demonstrated that the adsorption of human blood-borne protein molecules of widely varying size and purpose is more similar than different, and a quasi-thermodynamic model has been explored. In this presentation we independently evaluate the efficacy of this model, as well as provide a method to generalize the model for application to non-spherical protein molecules. This generalization allows for the application of this model to molecules such as fibrinogen, of significant importance to thrombogenic processes, as well as more accurate prediction of the tendency of BSA to adsorb into multi-layers at physiological concentrations, while HSA adsorbs into a monolayer. This difference elucidates the importance of molecular shape, as opposed to molecular weight, in the adsorption process, and suggests that this model can be applied to proteins from all species.