Macromolecular crowders exhibit extensive sot interactions with proteins.

What is it about?

Using solvation as the tool, we have shown that the commonly used macromolecular crowders exhibit extensive soft interactions with the two serum proteins, BSA and HSA. The data further reveal the intrinsic structural differences between these homologous proteins having high sequence identity.

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Why is it important?

Macromolecular crowding has mostly been attributed to the excluded volume effect that is described based on the hard sphere potential. The fact that at very low concentrations of the crowders we observed interactions strongly suggests the presence of soft potential. Solvation as a tool turned out to be extremely sensitive to small-scale perturbations so induced at these low concentrations of the crowding agents.