Studies on the interaction of caffeic acid with human serum albumin in membrane mimetic environments

In this work, fluorescence quenching technique, Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy and dynamic light scattering (DLS) technique were used to gain the binding information of caffeic acid and human serum albumin (HSA) in AOT/isooctane/water microemulsions. The interaction of HSA with caffeic acid at 296, 303, and 310 K in ω0 20 microemulsions was characterized by one binding site with the affinity constant K at (3.23 ± 0.01) × 104, (3.06 ± 0.03) × 104 and (2.82 ± 0.05) × 104 M−1, respectively. The affinities in microemulsions are much higher than that in buffer solution. The CD spectra and FT-IR spectra with qualitative and quantitative results proved that the protein secondary structure changed in the microemulsions in the absence and presence of caffeic acid compared with the free form of HSA in buffer. The binding process was exothermic and spontaneous, as indicated by the thermodynamic analyses. These data indicated that hydrophobic interaction played a major role in the binding of caffeic acid to HSA in microemulsions and electrostatic interaction can not be excluded. The displacement experiments confirmed that caffeic acid could bind to the site I of HSA, which was in agreement with the result of the molecular modeling study. Furthermore, the DLS data suggested that HSA may locate at the interface of the microemulsion and caffeic acid could interact with them.