Interfacial viscoelasticity, yielding and creep ringing of globular protein–surfactant mixtures

Abstract

Protein–surfactant mixtures arise in many industrial and biological systems, and indeed, blood itself is a mixture of serum albumins along with various other surface-active components. Bovine serum albumin (BSA) solutions, and globular proteins in general, exhibit an apparent yield stress in bulk rheological measurements at surprisingly low concentrations. By contrasting interfacial rheological measurements with corresponding interface-free data obtained using a microfluidic rheometer, we show that the apparent yield stress exhibited by these solutions arises from the presence of a viscoelastic layer formed due to the adsorption of protein molecules at the air–water interface. The coupling between instrument inertia and surface elasticity in a controlled stress device also results in a distinctive damped oscillatory strain response during creep experiments known as“creep ringing”. We show that this response can be exploited to extract the interfacial storage and loss moduli of the protein interface. The interfacial creep response at small strains can be described by a simple second order system, such as the linear Jeffreys model, however the interfacial response rapidly becomes nonlinear beyond strains of order 1%. We use the two complementary techniques of interfacial rheometry and microfluidic rheometry to examine the systematic changes in the surface and bulk material functions for mixtures of a common non-ionic surfactant, polysorbate 80, and BSA. It is observed that the nonlinear viscoelastic properties of the interface are significantly suppressed by the presence of even a relatively small amount of surfactant (c_surf > 10⁻³ wt.%). Preferential interfacial adsorption of the mobile surfactant at these surfactant concentrations results in complete elimination of the bulk apparent yield stress exhibited by surfactant-free BSA solutions.