Organic solvents were used in the present study as a means of investigating the non-covalent interactions involved in the maintenance and pertubation of the three-dimensional structure of the collagen macromolecule in solution. The two main types of non-covalent interaction under consideration are hydrogen bond formation and hydrophobic effects. Elucidation of the relative importance of these factors in the maintenance of the solution structure of proteins is an area of intensive investigation and fundamental significance to biochemistry as a whole. During the past decade, considerable progress has been made towards a clearer understanding of the forces involved, and a number of different theoretical and experimental approaches have emerged. Until about 1960, hydrogen bonding was widely believed to be the dominant non-covalent interaction responsible for the maintenance of secondary and tertiary structure in many proteins. Subsequently, an increasingly important role for apolar (hydrophobic) effects was suggested by a number of authors, and at present there is no satisfactorily definitive interpretation of the available experimental evidence. The current work is based on a comparison of the effects of organic solvents on widely different substrates, namely collagen, cellulose, and the chromatographic reference material, catechin. The chromatographic mobility of catechin on cellulose may be regarded as a phenomenon which is mediated entirely by polar interaction mechanisms. The effects of various organic perturbants and of changing solvent/water ratios are readily interpreted on this basis. In the collagenous systems, however, certain results appear to require the introduction of concepts other than those relating exclusively to polar bonding affinities. The experimental evidence shows that there are cases where the enhancement of the polar interaction potential of solvent/water mixtures, in relation to catechin-cellulose systems, is accompanied by an apparent reduction of polar interaction potential of the same solvent/water mixtures with respect to soluble collagen. The anomaly outlined above will be discussed in terms of two fundamentally different theoretical assumptions. In the first of these, the mechanism of perturbant action in collagenous systems is regarded as essentially similar to that governing catechin-cellulose affinity patterns. Thus, interaction processes are all treated as polar phenomena, in which direct hydrophobic destabilization of the collagen triple helix plays no part. In an attempt to explain the effects of perturbants in both collagen and cellulose-containing systems in terms of the above assumption, two hypotheses are examined involving (1) direct polar interaction between perturbant molecules and functional groups of the protein; (2.) the possibility of an enhanced polar interaction potential of water molecules, due to lowering of the environmental dielectric constant when organic solvents are added to the systems. Within the other broad conceptual division, collagen and cellulose substrates are considered to respond in fundamentally different ways to the action of organic perturbants. As before, cellulose-catechin-solvent interactions are treated as entirely polar phenomena, and perturbant effects interpreted in terms of mechanisms such as direct solvation of the substrate, and the enhanced hydrogen bonding activity of water molecules. In contrast, perturbant lyotropic action with respect to soluble collagen i s viewed as the manifestation of a major contribution by hydrophobic interaction processes to macromolecular stability. Thus, solvents that competitively reduce the assumed entropic contribution to the stability of the collagen triple helix, are seen as potential destabilizers of the native state of the protein and inhibitors of the regeneration of co-operative structures during renaturation. Both of the above approaches are critically assessed in the light of the present work and the dominant trends apparent in the recent literature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:rhodes/vital:3846 |
| Date | January 1971 |
| Creators | Hart, Geoffrey Joseph |
| Publisher | Rhodes University, Faculty of Science, Pharmacy |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Masters, MSc |
| Format | 157 p., pdf |
| Rights | Hart, Geoffrey Joseph |
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