In situ generation of the gold nanoparticles-bovine serum albumin (AuNPs–BSA) bioconjugated system using pulsed-laser ablation (PLA)

In this paper, in situ and ex situ approaches were used for the preparation of gold nanoparticles-bovine serum albumin bioconjugates. The comparison between the binding constants (Kb) and Gibbs free energies obtained from the fluorescence spectra of both approaches reveals that the Kb increases, while the Gibbs free energy decreases by decreasing the size of AuNPs in the in situ generation of the AuNPs–BSA bioconjugated system, which indicates a greater interaction of smaller AuNPs with BSA. Due to the importance of gold nanoclusters, which are produced during the in situ generation of AuNPs-BSA bioconjugate, theoretical calculations were performed to dock an Au42 nanocluster into BSA. The results show that the nanoclusters enter into the BSA and strongly interact with it, rather than the interaction with the BSA surface. Also, the best binding sites inside the BSA structure for the interaction with Au42 were determined using docking calculations.

Keywords:

Nanostructures , Computational techniques , Luminescence , Infrared spectroscopy (IR) , Transmission electron microscopy (TEM)