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Updated: Aug 19, 2026

Monitoring Protein Adsorption with Solid-state Nanopores
Published on: December 2, 2011
Dynamics of adsorption and desorption of proteins at an air/water interface
1Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Rutgers University, 08854, Piscataway, NJ, USA
Abstract:
Adsorption and desorption dynamics of lysozyme and beta-casein at the air/water interface were investigated through stress relaxation experiments. The resulting surface tension changes due to a step-type surface area disturbance, as a function of time, were measured through a capillary wave probe. The adsorption data, obtained after a surface area expansion, can be well fitted to a diffusion-controlled adsorption model. However, desorption relaxation following a surface compression is much slower and cannot be modeled by the diffusion theory. Characteristic diffusion frequency and high-frequency dilational elasticity for protein layers were also obtained and found to be consistent with data reported in the literature.
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