Revealing the Nanoparticle-Protein Corona with a Solid-State Nanopore

Protein adsorption at the liquid-solid interface is an old but not totally solved topic. One challenge is to find an easy way to characterize the protein behavior on nanoparticles and make a correlation with its intrinsic properties. This work aims to investigate protein adsorption on gold nanoparticles and the colloidal properties. The protein panel was chosen from different structural categories (mainly-alpha, mainly-beta or mix-alpha beta). The result shows that the colloidal stability with salt addition does not depend on the structural category. Conversely, using the single nanopore technique, we show that the mainly-alpha proteins form a smaller corona than the mainly-beta proteins. We assign these observations to the lower internal energy of alpha-helices, making them more prone to form a homogeneous corona layer.